Summary of Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get inside. For me, an inveterate traveler and foreign correspondent, life is like room service: you never know what you’re going to find outside your door.

#2 The foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times is the best job in the world. I get to travel anywhere and have attitudes about what I see and hear. But I had to decide which attitudes to use, and what would be the lens, the perspective, the organizing system through which I would look at the world.

#3 I began my column as a tourist without an attitude. I was not just in some messy, incoherent, and indefinable post–Cold War world. I was in a new international system called globalization.

#4 The Cold War was an international system that was characterized by division. The world was a divided-up, chopped-up place, and both your threats and opportunities grew out of who you were divided from.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822502550

IRB Media

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Insights on Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get inside. For me, an inveterate traveler and foreign correspondent, life is like room service: you never know what you’re going to find outside your door.

#2

The foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times is the best job in the world. I get to travel anywhere and have attitudes about what I see and hear. But I had to decide which attitudes to use, and what would be the lens, the perspective, the organizing system through which I would look at the world.

#3

I began my column as a tourist without an attitude. I was not just in some messy, incoherent, and indefinable post–Cold War world. I was in a new international system called globalization.

#4

The Cold War was an international system that was characterized by division. The world was a divided-up, chopped-up place, and both your threats and opportunities grew out of who you were divided from.

#5

The globalization system is a bit different from the Cold War system. It is characterized by integration, and it is the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies. It is also producing a backlash from those who are being left behind.

#6

Globalization has its own defining technologies: computerization, miniaturization, digitization, satellite communications, fiber optics, and the Internet. The defining perspective of globalization is integration.

#7

The defining economists of the globalization system are Joseph Schumpeter and Intel chairman Andy Grove, who prefer to unleash capitalism. They believe that the more countries allow capitalism to destroy inefficient companies, the more money will be freed up and directed to more innovative ones.

#8

Globalization is a sport that requires you to constantly race, and if you win, you have to race again the next day. The defining anxiety of the Cold War was fear of annihilation from an enemy you knew all too well, but the defining anxiety of the globalization era is fear of rapid change from an enemy you can’t see or touch.

#9

The third balance in the globalization system is between individuals and nation-states. Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history.

#10

The system of globalization has come upon us far faster than our ability to retrain ourselves to see and comprehend it. We barely understood how the Cold War system was going to play out thirty years after Churchill’s speech, when Routledge published a book of essays about how the Soviet economy was going to work in 2000.

#11

The two key economists who were advising Long-Term Capital Management, Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes, shared the Nobel Prize for economics in 1997. In 1998, they won the booby prize for creating risk.

#12

The chaos exhibit at the Barcelona science museum illustrates the nonlinear behavior of a pendulum. If you try to imitate the initial position and velocity, the subsequent motion is different from what it was the first time.

#13

I used to make up the weather reports from Beirut, and I would estimate what the temperature was by ad hoc polling. I would then write, High 90 degrees.

#14

I learned to look at the world through a multilens perspective, and at the same time, convey that complexity to readers through simple stories. I used two techniques: I do information arbitrage to understand the world, and I tell stories to explain it.

#15

I began my journalistic career as the most narrow of reporters. I covered the Arab-Israeli conflict for the first decade of my career, and I did not know anything about any other parts of the world. Then in 1988, I left Jerusalem and came to Washington, where I became the New York Times diplomatic correspondent.

#16

I began to realize that the rise and power of markets was due to the recent advances in technology. I couldn’t explain the forces that were shaping global politics unless I understood these technologies that were empowering people, companies, and governments in all sorts of new ways.

#17

I believe that the new system of globalization, in which walls between countries, markets, and disciplines are being blown up, constitutes a fundamentally new state of affairs. And the only way to understand it is by arbitraging all six dimensions laid out above.

#18

The American strategist, politician, and diplomat Paul Kennedy and the Yale international relations historians John Lewis Gaddis believe that it is important to have particularists in every subject, but it is also important that the particularists alone not be the ones making and analyzing foreign policy.

#19

The world is a web, and changes made in one place will inevitably affect others. It is important to understand how your decisions will affect other places.

#20

The best way to understand and explain globalization is through simple stories. The system of globalization is not just influencing people in more ways at the same time, but also shaping wages, interest rates, living standards, culture,