A Future Perfect The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization

A Future Perfect

The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization

By: John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge

386 pp.

Times Books 2000

Review by: Lydia Morris Brown

Without a doubt, globalization-the integration of the world economy-has become the most important economic, political, and cultural phenomenon of the times, reshaping business, transforming the lives of individuals, and creating new social classes and new jobs and unimaginable wealth and abject poverty. This contentious, complicated, and confusing subject that everyone talks about, but nobody really defines, means different things to different people. As a result, globalization has increasingly come under attack from increasingly vocal critics. A Future Perfect is a definitive guide to globalization that provides a comprehensive, accessible analysis, in which fact is meticulously disentangled from fiction and order is brought to bear on the phenomenon’s inherent contradictions. The result is an intellectual case for globalization that exposes its harsh realities and difficult challenges in order to celebrate its extraordinary power and potential.