The Road to Global Prosperity
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
In That Used to Be Us, the blockbuster Michael Mandelbaum wrote with Thomas L. Friedman, the authors analyzed the challenges America faces, including globalization, and described a path to recovering America’s greatness.
In his widely and well reviewed The Road to Global Prosperity, Mandelbaum, one of America’s leading authorities on international affairs, looks at whether our optimism about the world’s economic future is justified in view of the financial meltdown of 2008, still being felt; Europe’s troubled currency; the slowing growth of China and other emerging nations. He concludes that while the global economy does face major challenges in the years ahead, there are compelling reasons to believe for optimism.
Mandelbaum says that globalization is both irreversible and a positive force for the United States and the world. As technology and free markets expand and national leaders realize that their political power rests on delivering prosperity, countries will cooperate more. As more nations connect, their economies will grow. As immigration increases, as more money crosses borders, and as more countries emerge from poverty, individuals and societies around the world will benefit.
The Road to Global Prosperity illuminates the crucial issues that will determine the economic future. Mandelbaum makes a persuasive case for optimism as well as offering a concrete, practical guide to the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The world economy will continue speeding along the highway to wealth and freedom, with a few bumps along the way, according to this conventional primer on globalization. Johns Hopkins professor Mandelbaum (The Frugal Superpower) advocates standard neo-liberal principles of free markets, free trade, and free immigration as almost unalloyed blessings to every nation that help knit the world into a peaceful economic community. (Transnational investment flows, he allows, are disruptive enough to require regulation.) He also explores the central role of politics in nurturing or debilitating the market: the public goods of military security and financial stability must be provided, either by the United States "the World's Policeman" or by international cooperation; governments must finesse protectionist and anti-immigrant backlashes; China, Russia, India, and Brazil must reform state and political dysfunctions to maintain growth. Mandelbaum pens lucid overviews of everything from comparative advantage to the Eurozone crisis, but his accounts are sometimes simplistic and couched in metaphors that evoke more than they explain. (The Great Recession, he writes, was a "drinking binge" followed by a "heart attack" and then "the flu.") Mandelbaum is adept at popularizing orthodox political economy, but there's nothing here that has not been said with more insight by other treatises on globalization.
