Required reading for those of us who aren't economics majors. Easy read, educational and thought provoking.
"The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism-the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. Therefore, globalization also has it's own set of economic rules - rules that revolve around opening, deregulating and privatizing your economy, in order to make it more competitive and attractive to foreign investment. In 1975, only 8% of countries worldwide had liberal, free-market regimes and foreign direct investment at the time totaled only $23 billion, according to the World Bank. By 1997, the number of countries with liberal economic regimes constituted 28% and foreign investment totaled $644 billion."

Ok, here goes my first "one-star" book review on GoodReads.

The only thing I got from this book was the mental strength to suffer through something so incredibly short-sighted and consequential about the world we live in. Not only was his analysis full of logical gaps about the relationship between market behavior and GDP growth, his writing is cheeky and cringe-worthy. It's really not worth the read, so just imagine Matthew McConaughey's character on Wolf of Wall Street writing a book on globalization. Here's an example:

"Listening to Mahithir's rant, I tried to imagine what then-US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin would have said to the Malaysian leader had he been able to speak his mind. I think it would have been something like this: 'Ah, excuse me, Mahathir, but what planet are you living on? You talk about participating in globalization as if it were a choice you had. Globalization isn't a choice. It's a reality...You keep looking for someone to complain to, someone to take the heat off your markets, someone to blame. Well, guess what, Mahathir, there's no one on the other end of the Phone!'"

Skip this one and go straight to Shock Doctrine if you're looking for the lowdown on Globalization, unless you want to read a petty summary of a sub-par journalist talk about how many important people and places he has seen in his capitalist adventures, while getting way too excited about the advent of e-mail. Despite his forward to the book, Friedman is just as oversimplified and outdated as Fukuyama.

Didn't finish it - it was out of date and boring.

A must read for students of international relations, economics, and business.

Thomas L. Friedman is a fuck. The copy of this I have has so much highlighter ink in it that the pages look like rainbows and the only reason I took the time to do that is so that I could easily find all the backward and sometimes down right stupid things he said in it. "..the easier it is to fire workers, the more incentive companies have to hire them." What he should have said in other words: flexible labor market = lower wages (and higher profits). "Air power alone couldn't work in Vietnam because a people who are already in the stone age couldn't be bombed back into it." See that was easy. And just so we are clear he supports these ideas and I did not take them out of context. The guy is a soulless huckster one step above Ann Coulter on the evil/stupid scale.

Should have been titled The Lexus OR the Olive Branch: Pick One

Honestly, no different than the other book oh his i read "The World is Flat". Globalization is a fact but Friedman beats the pulp out of it example after example. The same words appear again and again .. Beirut Bangkok Bangalore. Maybe it was indeed a novelty to gawk at Japanese Television in Sub Saharan Africa in the 90s .. but its more or less taken for granted 20 years later.
This book hasn't aged well. I am probably not exaggerating when i say that what was considered a ingenuity or luxury two decades back is now the obvious and rather a necessity.
The book is more to do with history than the future now.

Weird to read a pre-9/11 book explaining why there are so few wars and why Clinton style liberalism is the winner of global politics. Naturally there are enough caveats provided for the theory to survive current events, but that really just speaks to how weak the underlying theory is.

Anyway, it's mostly an interesting if boring time capsule. Most of the book consists of anecdotes about how ubiquitous the Internet is, and how it's only a matter of time before we are always connected through our pagers and such. There's also a fun section where he describes how a new venture by Enron might create a new economic reality with Enron and the U.S. on top.

Thời điểm mình đọc cuốn sách này thì thế giới đã và đang ở một giai đoạn phát triển rất khác so với hồi nó được viết ra năm 1999. Mình không thích dùng lại từ "toàn cầu hóa", bác Thomas là người Mỹ thì rõ ràng là súy Mỹ, nhưng mà tựu trung đã chỉ ra những giá trị định hình và lèo lái thế giới hiện đại không phải là của nả dân tộc của riêng một nước nào. Mình thích quyển này và insight của vấn đề.

20 năm là khoảng cách đổi thay kinh ngạc.
Việt Nam ơi, bao giờ đến nơi!

Nhưng người ta thường nói, "Điều gì tốt đẹp quá đến nỗi không thể tin được thì thường là không tin được thật."
Khi cuộc sống trôi đi gấp gáp thì cũng ít ai kéo dài thêm nỗi nhớ.
(Trích "Chiếc Lexus & cây ô liu")

Friedman's experience is no doubt a certification of credibility, but his voice and self-branded terminology seem to seep through the pages a bit too much in my opinion. Breaking concepts down to metaphor can be helpful, but it was hard to keep up with Lexuses, olive trees, Electronic Herds, Golden Straightjackets, racing tracks, oranges etc. Nonetheless, this is still an eye-opening work and its conversational, informal style of writing makes it unique among other academic texts.

For reasons I cannot understand, this book is treated as canonical in high school economics classrooms across the country. Friedman presents an argument that is not only exceedingly hypocritical but asserted almost entirely through a jungle of personal anecdotes. The Lexus and the Olive Tree is not so much an explanation of globalization as it is a laundry list of interesting people that Friedman knows and you do not. Methodology aside, the arguments Friedman makes are more often than not deeply flawed. Many of the ideas Friedman babbles about are considered debatable (the "Electronic Herd") at best, or flat-out absurd (the "Golden Straitjacket") at worst. This "straitjacket" is the focal point of his argument, and it takes him a few hundred pages to get around to the crux of it. To summarize: Having spoken to 50 or 60 of his friends, Friedman declares that economic growth, specifically in emerging markets, demands a paring down of any form of social safety net, open arms to foreign investment, and a deregulatory fiscal policy on the part of the government in question. Friedman disregards the fact that heavily subsidized agricultural exports from the United States, for example, undercut domestic prices in many of these emerging markets and bankrupt local agricultural industries. The United States' own tariffs and quotas were what allowed U.S. industry and agriculture to flourish in the first place, but present-day emerging markets are somehow expected to open their borders and allow their markets to be flooded with development-stifling imports from first world economies and subsidy driven low prices. All of this aside, perhaps the most grating element of The Lexus and the Olive Tree is Friedman's penchant for creating ridiculous names for existing and well-defined economic and political phenomena. The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention stands in as the fat sister of Democratic Peace Theory (Heard of Israel and Lebanon, Thomas? Give Russia and Georgia a few more months, perhaps.). DOScapital (a witticism perhaps overheard in a middle-school remedial English program) is a ridiculous way of describing what most have deemed the global economy; i.e. capitalism. The Electronic Herd? Capitol investors. Microchip Immune Deficiency? Insufficient decentralization and technophobia. In summation, The Lexus and the Olive Tree attempts to explain the nature and processes of globalization by combining a long list of people with whom Thomas Friedman has had lunch, kitschy jargon, five or six thousand poorly-chosen metaphors, a smattering of jingoism, a dedication to the unregulated free market that would make Lady Thatcher blush, and no formal education in economics whatsoever. It's good for a laugh, I suppose.

I'd initially picked this book up, as it was referenced in "Rich Dad's guide to investing - Robert Kiyosaki", with the thought that this would be a foray into global markets and would better help me understand finance beyond traditional borders. Although it wasn't exactly what I expected it to be, on the contrary it turned out to be a polar opposite to my assumption, this book did leave behind quite a few thoughts that really puts the concept of globalization into perspective.

Written in the simplest language, this book is the perfect medium for any reader to delve into the thought process of a Pulitzer winning author exploring globalization in the modern age. In my experience, any account of globalization I'd read prior to this would cite examples and elaborate principles, relevant to a generation or time period before my time. This book however is very modernized in it's approach making it a good read for people of all ages.

The essence of the book focuses on the human desire of enrichment (the Lexus) confronting the human need for identity and community (the olive tree). A successful globalization movement focuses on how both can be achieved at the same time. With emphasis on the "Electronic Herd" and their behaviour in today's world, he lays out many interesting policies about globalization that really bring clarity to the subject.

All in all, the book is a great read, with a theme of simplicity, as a reader you leave the book debating some of the points he's mentioned while also gaining a wider perspective about the subject in general.

Up to present, this book is a bit obsolete. Too many events has occurred, everything’s going at a manifique ways: Tesla, amazone, iphone, etc, and China. In the prediction of the author, China would not go at a rocket speed due to balance with their own size. However, today, China is like a balance polar of US.
Still, so many concepts and theories in the book is still hot: growing sustainability, how to adapt to the globalization, etc.
I am really looking forward to his updated version of this book: in 2019, is it still about the lexus and the olive tree?