From Global to Local: The Making of Things and the End of Globalization

by Finbarr Livesey

Overview

This brilliantly original book dismantles the underlying assumptions that drive the decisions made by companies and governments throughout the world, to show that our shared narrative of the global economy is deeply flawed. If left unexamined, they will lead corporations and countries astray, with dire consequences for us all.

For the past fifty years or so, the global economy has been run on three big assumptions:  that globalization will continue to spread, that trade is the engine of growth and development, and that economic power is moving from the West to the East. More recently, it has also been taken as a given that our interconnectedness—both physical and digital—will increase without limit.  But what if all these ideas are wrong? What if everything is about to change? What if it has already begun to change but we just haven't noticed?

Increased automation, the advent of additive manufacturing (3D printing, for example), and changes in shipping and environmental pressures, among other factors, are coming together to create a fast-changing global economic landscape in which the rules are being rewritten—at once a challenge and an opportunity for companies and countries alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525562979
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/09/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

FINBARR LIVESEY is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. He has consulted for a number of national governments and presented to multinational corporations on new models of industrial policy. Livesey studied public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and was a director of GeoPartners, a consultancy based in Boston. He also assisted in setting up the Open Economies Project at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

Read an Excerpt

An excerpt from Chapter 1: Go East, Young Man?
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "From Global to Local"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Finbarr Livesey.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. Go East, Young Man? 1
2. From Putting Out to Getting Out 24
3. “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot,” or How We Will Make 42
4. All Hail Our Robot Overlords 62
5. Getting from A to NA in a Hilly World 81
6. Manufacturing the Environment 97
7. Looking Through the Other End of the Telescope 116
8. Mapping the Fracture Between the Physical and the Digital 133
9. The Changing Politics of Manufacturing 153
Epilogue: The Post World 173

Notes 181
Select Bibliography and Further Reading 201
Index 203

Editorial Reviews

"Refreshing . . . The future of globalization may be determined less by a rarified battle of ideas than by something as simple as the 3D printer. Finbarr Livesey's book gives a nod to the idea that protectionist politicians are a threat to world trade, but his focus is very largely on the impersonal progress of technology . . . [He offers] detailed descriptions of individual products and processes he has gleaned through his years of consulting for international companies."
—Alan Beattie, Financial Times

"The great strength of Livesey’s book is to make us look more closely and intelligently at the underlying drivers of globalization. Whether more or less of it, there will surely be a different kind of globalization in the coming years. Livesey’s fine book will help us understand and anticipate the changing dynamics of global economic interdependence."
—Finance & Development

From the Publisher

09/04/2017
Livesey, a Cambridge lecturer on politics and international studies, puts forth the thought-provoking and disruptive premise that globalization is not the way of the future. He posits accepted wisdom on globalization’s victory as misleading and argues that, instead of being in the midst of an ever-expanding world economy, societies are operating on an economic model that became obsolete over the past few decades. As evidence that globalization is already on the decline, he cites the United States’s increased tariffs on foreign goods and current pledges to end trade deals, and the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union. In addition, he cogently points out one downside of globalization’s ascendancy: what he calls the “hollowing out of the industrial common,” in which skills and infrastructure leave a country along with outsourced manufacturing jobs. To bring to light a positive alternative to this trend, Livesey discusses how localization in manufacturing is already taking place, with a print-on-demand machine at the Harvard Bookstore and a process currently under development at Wake Forest University for creating artificial human organs rather than relying on donations. Livesey’s insightful and reflective work makes a convincing argument that the economic landscape of the future is already being significantly reshaped. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

05/01/2017
We're so convinced that globalization is the name of the game in business, government, and culture that we haven't noticed that the world is shifting away from that model. So argues Livesey, a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge, who cites increased automation, additive manufacturing, and environmental pressures among the many reasons we're going local.

Library Journal

2017-07-03
Just as Francis Fukuyama was wrong about history, this book of geopolitical wonkery has it, so all our assumptions about globalization are mistaken—and, perhaps worse, woefully out of date.What if the free trade models that hold that capital, commodities, and labor should move at will from country to country are wrong—if, that is, they proceeded from "an outmoded theory of comparative advantage"? That outmoded theory has, after all, resulted in the flow of manufacturing jobs from Oshkosh to Harbin as well as offshoring, outsourcing, multinationalizing. Livesey (Politics and International Studies/Cambridge Univ.), who notes that his own family stretches across the world's time zones, posits that there are any number of good reasons why, in the near future, economic players should question received wisdom and realign accordingly. For one thing, he writes, the near-future economy is likely to be much more highly automated than it is today, meaning that most labor will be done by machines rather than cheap workers in the developing world. The need will be for highly skilled workers to direct and service those machines, and in this regard there is no penalty for manufacturing work to stay close to home. In such a scenario, domestic markets would need to deepen. As the author points out, the in-China market for iPhones is now greater than the market for that commodity in the U.S., so it's not a stretch to see this happen, even if China "will no longer be able to depend on its role as producer to the world to continue its development." In a world of 3-D printers and robots, Livesey cautions, international trade will continue but likely with a more regional than truly global emphasis. The argument, accessible and without jargon, is more complex than the simple-minded anti-trade pact economic nationalism that has come to the fore in recent months, but it may still comfort everyone from Occupy Wall Street to the West Wing.

Kirkus Reviews