I have to say upfront that if I hadn't had to read this book for a class, I would've tossed it early on, without having read enough to write a review. But having read as much of it as I have, I might as well get some use out of it -- certainly the book's contents weren't worth the time. Just about any book has some good insights, otherwise it probably wouldn't have gotten published. But any insights here are overcome by the author's exaggerations.



Perhaps part of the author's misunderstandings can be attributed to the book having been written in 1991. Maybe if he were writing it today, after a near-financial collapse only prevented by government action, he'd be less impressed by the growth of multi-national financial institutions. For certain, I think he'd have to modify his statement that economic globalization has overtaken and weakened national states as proven by the U.S.'s seeking coalition partners to eject Iraq from Kuwait -- that the U.S. is no longer capable of going it alone. (If only.) But the book has a revision date of 2001, which is after the neoconservatives won the 2000 election, putting two former oil company executives in charge. Hmm, let's see -- think they might invade an oil state?



Unfortunately, that was hardly the only bizarre assertion. As with most globalization cheerleaders, Waters is awed by the idea of instantly communicating with someone halfway around the world. Well, clearly, you can send the email or make the phone call or whatever, but you're not going to get a response back instantly, because the guy at the other end will be asleep. Nowhere in the book does the author seem to recognize the existence of timezones. No matter how much the world "shrinks", if you're an American corporate manager who needs to schedule a conference call with management at your Chinese factory, you'll need a couple of days to set this up so that you can synchronize hours. That Prof Waters is unaware of this indicates to me he's written a book about something he has had no actual experience with -- that he's just doing armchair speculation about what the future will be like.



And 1991 was apparently a bad year to be a budding futurist, as Waters completely missed the rise of China.



There's lots more to wonder about: like the author's bemoaning the waning of the influence of universalizing religions. This is doubly disconcerting: that he missed the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the 80s and 90s -- what actually did he revise in 2001? -- and that he thinks religion is unifying.



Prof Waters also has the disconcerting habit of contradicting himself. For instance, in a section where he asserts that nationalism is irrational (?), he lauds the defeat and death of nationalistic Italy, Japan, and Germany in WWII by the liberal and communist countries. In the next paragraph, he asserts, correctly, that Stalinism was very much Russian nationalism, on his way to making another point, but apparently forgetting his previous point.



It can't be denied that the book is well-researched, full of statistics and quotations. But they're seemingly all selected to promote globalization. Globalization has a dark side, which is not treated here. E.g., the textile worker laid off from a mill in South Carolina is not going to move to China to get a new job. Some things are more easily globalized -- such as what sociologists refer to as symbolic products -- intangibles. But other things are not, and shouldn't be. Orthodox economists often make the mistake of thinking labor is a commodity. Usually, sociologists have more sense that that.



Anyway, I've read a number of books dealing with globalization and this is easily the worst. The only reason to read it is if you think globalization is wonderful and you want to hear your opinions repeated. But don't think, even though this is a work by an academic, that this is an academic work.