14 June 2002 I went to a small banquet for the foreign teachers at 6 today. We all piled into the van and Leon, the vice-dean of the department, told me we were going to the police so I could be locked up. There was a big show at the dinner table of getting vegetarian dishes, which made it worse when I left after an hour for a "prior engagement, so sorry." I did kinda hate to leave because I liked everyone at the table, but the way out was smoothed by the fact that speeches had started. Chloe actually started in on "Since China will have the 2008 Olympics ... English ..." and I thought she had been taken over by pod people. I've tried to analyze the reason that the standard litany "As you know, China will enter the WTO ... Beijing will host the 2008 Olympics ... English is more and more important ..." drives me nuts. Part of it, I think, is that these ideas are now so embedded in everybody's mind that repeating them is like starting all your thoughts with, "Since the sun rises in the east...." We all know, it's rarely topical, just shut up already. Chloe did later explain that she had a specific incident in mind; she wanted to ask about reports that people were being arrested for not learning English fast enough. Anyway.

I left the restaurant and grabbed a taxi for Guangxi Normal and the Cow's Tail Bar. I made it there a few minutes before the football matches started, and grabbed a chair where I could watch both TVs. One showed the Korea-Portugal game, and the other USA-Poland. In order to advance, the USA had to win or tie Poland, which had already lost twice and was eliminated. If the USA lost, we would still advance if Korea won, or if Korea lost by a huge margin. A very polyconditional evening.

The bar soon filled up with Americans, teachers and students from Guangxi normal. What was creepy was that a number had Chinese girlfriends. I guess it's okay for the students, but Jules, one of the teachers with whom I'd shared a train ride last National Day holiday, was there with his girlfriend, and I'd actually heard that they're engaged. And that she's a student. My first impression of Jules put him at 30, my second at 25, and then I heard that he's 21. Even so, I don't understand how someone can not be affected by all the warning flags. Good luck to them, I suppose.

The USA was supposed to beat Poland, and Portugal to beat Korea, but nobody had read the script. Poland replaced half their team with new players, many making their World Cup debuts, and they played _hard_. Poland scored in the third minute thanks to sloppy American defense. The US scored an equalizer a minute later which was then disqualified because the player had committed some imperceptible foul against a defender in front of the open net. The air went out of the US team, and in the fifth minute Poland scored again and the game was effectively over.

Korea was tough as usual, and the Portugese players quickly got frustrated and committed stupid fouls. Soon a red card appeared, and Portugal was playing a man down. We started cheering for Korea.

The US team generally played much better in the losing effort to Poland than in the winning and tying games against Portugal and Korea. They maintained possession, kept the ball up in the Polish half, didn't give up too many stoopid turnovers. But the finishing touch was gone; the attackers fired shot after shot from far away, mostly going wide or easily blocked. The US defense firmed up, but eventually gave away a penalty kick. Which Friedel then blocked. Goddamn.

Korea scored late in the second half, and suddenly we all felt much better. Portugal got a second red card, and then we just counted down the minutes. The US finally scored a goal, but the final score was USA 1, Poland 3. But, since Korea won 1-0, we proceed to the second round to face, and presumably be slaughtered by, Mexico. Monday at 2:30 pm; I can't wait.

After the game I walked home, about two miles. It was wet, but not actually raining, just super-foggy. And not too hot, which was nice. As I passed the bakery near campus, the baker chased me down and, simultaneously, it started raining. When I tried to beg out of a conversation because of the rain, he naturally went to get me an umbrella, and then followed for a block trying to stuff the umbrella into my hand. I was very friendly, and ordered (I think) a hundred fifty cookies for the final exam in two weeks, but I didn't take the umbrella. When I got home I was soaked, but in a good way.

15 June 2002

England played Denmark. I watched bits and pieces. The whole first half it was raining. A Dane lost his shoe, and as play continued the camera showed him desperately chewing on the lace to get it untied while he tried to follow the ball. England won 3-0.

Germany and Paraguay played. I slept through most of the match. Germany scored in the 86th minute to win 1-0.

I don't usually send out lengthy book reviews, but The Lexus and the Olive Tree irked me so much that I took notes on why, and so here they are:

1) Thomas Friedman is an archetypical tool; his picture ought to be in the dictionary. He writes with a breezy, reasonably charming style, making it very easy to identify with him (think Dave Barry, minus the intermittently rib-shattering humor). And he gives indications of being a critical thinker, of seeing both sides. But when you stop and think, and sometimes even just as you read his prose, it's evident that he's swallowed enough of the party line to floss his intestines. He frequently quotes ad copy, proudly stating that he finds the copywriters to be (need quote here). And he cites in-flight magazine articles that are obviously recaps of press releases. He's journalism at its worst, not just parroting the PR flacks but actually admiring them and, presumably, appreciative of the good work they do in getting the word out about how good their companies are.

Sometimes Friedman has useful insights. He portrays EU agricultural policy, which I had always understood to be screwy but never known why, as a deliberate cultural subsidy for Southern France. True or not, it's worth thinking about. But then he approvingly quotes Steve Ballmer's explanation of why China will be a good market even though per capita annual income is comparable to the price of a single Microsoft product: grandparents will save up the money year by year in order to buy their grandkids the gate fee for the modern economy. Think about that for a minute. Ballmer is proud that Microsoft has enough power to induce Chinese peasants to give the proceeds of, literally, _years of physical labor_, to convicted criminals in Redmond. Seen in that context, those 10-yuan bootlegs of Windows make me want to cheer.

I started an Intellectual Property conversation with some of the Australian teachers. Tasmanian Michael's first comment was, "you mean like when the Americans copied all the Dickens novels?" Remember that the United States was a rampant violator of international IP laws right up until the twentieth century, when we became a net producer, not consumer, and changed our tune in a hurry.

A few other nits: Jack Nicholson is quoted as an authority on world trade. Larry Summers is quoted so often that his name should be on the cover. And all those pet names for economic patterns are cloying, and the dismissive names (such as "Turtles") given to people he disagrees with, based on his simplistic assumptions about their world-views, are demeaning.

Fundamentally, the book is premised on a systematic misunderstanding of anti-globalization. Friedman is a cheerleader cum apologist for globalism as a faceless, inevitable force, something that's bound to happen sooner or later, and that therefore we'd better get used to. This misses the point completely.

First, let's talk about inevitability. Gravity is inevitable. The law of supply and demand is, in my opinion, inevitable in any system of trading. That humans will not work hard or well if they are not rewarded proportionally is inevitable. Any economic system that ignores the emergent properties of markets and the basic facts of human motivation will fail. My favorite example is the origin of health benefits in the United States: During World War II, wages were frozen for most (all?) occupations in the US. But supply and demand still crept through, because companies looked for tools to attract the best workers, and came up with health benefits, which weren't limited like salary. The underlying need of the market to express demand found an alternative mode. Similarly, globalization is inevitable because technology reduces distance.

And yet. No modern economy hosts unfettered free markets. Regulations, massive subsidies - in the first half of 2002 alone, new military, agricultural, and industrial subsidies each in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars - national economic policies, federal funding for basic and applied research, tax-based economic policies in every political unit from the country to the county, the city, and the neighborhood. Americans have a working relationship with, not subservience to, the law of supply and demand.

Similarly, globalization isn't inevitable. Twenty-five years ago all of these inevitably globalizing technologies were already old news, but China, a fifth of the world, was almost completely isolated from the system. Worldwide shipping networks that reduce transportation costs to pennies per toy dog are the result of billions of dollars of investment and continuous maintenance and improvement; similarly, the satellites and cables that enable me to write this message in China and send it to readers on two continents didn't grow on trees. We have a global system by design.

One might argue that it's an emergent design. A bottom-up design. No one person sat down after the Great War to sketch out the companies and the networks needed for globalization. American universities didn't conspire to become worldwide magnets, they just happened to have the right characteristics to attract students from around the world. Container shipping was invented to save money. Globalization is inevitable, after all, because improving technology, combined with the profit motive, drove development of worldwide networks piece by piece, even though nobody ever had a grand design.

But. Completely absent from Friedman's book is what I feel to be the strongest argument against "globalization." It is that globalization in its current form (IMF, WTO, WIPO, and all the other letters), is an extension of all previous economic systems, which were designed, deliberately or as an emergent expression of individual greed, to enrich the haves at the expense of the have-nots. Feudal lords took tribute from their vassals in exchange for protection, probably charging far above market rate for their monopoly services. CEOs pocket millions of dollars, and millions more when they fail. The East India Company's tea/opium/spices triangle trade transferred vast wealth from India and China to Britain, and even now in the third millenium the Third World continues to export wealth to the First World. And throughout it all, the people who handle the money always seem to do well for themselves.

I don't know how absolute this historical trend is - that's a statistical, not a theoretical question, and I haven't done the research. Every country that's created a middle class has bucked the trend - but perhaps credit for middle classes goes to technology instead, the great leveler. Why haven't there been any famous, long-lived economic systems in which the rich didn't exploit the poor? Is there some fundamental reason that they can never work? We seem to instead have a perpetual, shifting balance - Henry Ford pays living wages to his employees and sets the tone for decades; later, CEOs realize that nobody will stop them from just taking all the money (yet) and the balance shifts again. The fairness of our systems and institutions is a dynamic variable. Where's the line between the collective self-interest that makes everybody winners and the greed that makes almost everybody a loser? What can we do, both tactically and strategically, to tip the balance? Or, as the situation seems, more depressingly, to be, to avoid losing much more ground to narrow greed? To me, these are the interesting, the important questions in the debate over globalism, but you won't find any of this in Friedman's book.

The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. Wow. Best book I've read all year. Stick out the first fifty pages - it gets slightly less depressing.