The Lexus and the Olive Tree

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999. First Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xix, [1], 394 pages. Index. Slight wear and small chip to DJ edges. Inscribed by the author on the half-title. Thomas Loren Friedman (born July 20, 1953) is an American journalist, author, and three time Pulitzer Prize winner. Friedman currently writes a weekly column for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues. The author has won two Pulitzers and a National Book Award and is a long-time journalist on foreign affairs with vast experience and knowledge of global economics. In June 1984, Friedman was transferred to Jerusalem, where he served as the New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief until February 1988. That year he received a second Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, which cited his coverage of the First Palestinian Intifada. He wrote a book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, describing his experiences in the Middle East, which won the 1989 U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction. Following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, Friedman became the White House correspondent for the New York Times. In 1994, he began to write more about foreign policy and economics, and moved to the op-ed page of The New York Times the following year as a foreign affairs columnist. In 2002, Friedman won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his "clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat." He examines how globalization has changed the world economy, and considers the benefits of free-market capitalism, and the need to balance local forces (religious, national, and cultural) with international forces. Friedman's book is the result of his unique access to world leaders in business and government. A New York Times Notable Book for 1999. The Lexus and the Olive Tree is a 1999 book by Thomas L. Friedman that posits that the world is currently undergoing two struggles: the drive for prosperity and development, symbolized by the Lexus, and the desire to retain identity and traditions, symbolized by the olive tree. He says he came to this realization while eating a sushi box lunch on a Japanese bullet train after visiting a Lexus factory and reading an article about conflict in the Middle East. Friedman explains "globalization" by recounting stories of his actual experiences in interfacing with many of the global movers and shakers. He proposes that "globalization is not simply a trend or fad but is, rather, an international system. It is the system that has replaced the old Cold War system, and, like that Cold War System, globalization has its own rules and logic that today directly or indirectly influence the politics, environment, geopolitics and economics of virtually every country in the world." The "Big Idea" in The Lexus and the Olive Tree is found on page 232 where Friedman explains that: "if you can't see the world, and you can't see the interactions that are shaping the world, you surely cannot strategize about the world." He states that "you need a strategy for how to choose prosperity for your country or company." The book puts forward a capitalist peace theory called the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention: No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's. He supported that observation, as a theory, by stating that when a country has reached an economic development where it has a middle class strong enough to support a McDonald's network, it would become a "McDonald's country", and will not be interested in fighting wars anymore. In the 2000 edition of the book, Friedman evaded criticism of his theory as follows: "I was both amazed and amused by how much the Golden Arches Theory had gotten around and how intensely certain people wanted to prove it wrong. They were mostly realists and out-of-work Cold Warriors who insisted that politics, and the never-ending struggle between nation-states, were the immutable defining feature of international affairs, and they were professionally and psychologically threatened by the idea that globalization and economic integration might actually influence geopolitics in some very new and fundamental ways." He also explains how globalization can cause Brazilification-the loss of the middle class and increase in income gap-of countries impacted by the trend. Brazilification is a neologism included in Douglas Coupland's 1991 book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. The expression was used in a similar way by the American writer Michael Lind as "Brazilianisation of America" in his book The Next American Nation and by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck as "Brasilianisierung des Westens" in his book Schöne neue Arbeitswelt (translated title: Brave new world of work). In 2005, Friedman said that he framed this theory in terms of McDonald's Golden Arches "with tongue slightly in cheek". In his 2005 book The World is Flat he offered an updated theory he labelled the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention.