The Long Tail of Globalization

The current issue of Foreign Policy has an article that attempts to dispel the notion that The World is Flat. According to author Pankaj Ghemawat, less than 10% of patents, phone call revenues, management research, direct investment and “management cases” cross borders. In his opinion, if globalization truly lived up to its hype, he would expect these measures to register at much higher levels (e.g. “90% for foreign investment”). The author contends:

These and other data on cross-border integration suggest a semiglobalized world, in which neither the bridges nor the barriers between countries can be ignored. From this perspective, the most astonishing aspect of various writings on globalization is the extent of exaggeration involved. In short, the levels of internationalization in the world today are roughly an order of magnitude lower than those implied by globalization proponents.

The author feels that globalization has been over-hyped and that “The World is Flat” thinking is both dangerous and not reflective of reality. In his view, a better model is a “Clash of Civilizations” posited by Samuel Huntington…

The champions of globalization are describing a world that doesn’t exist. It’s a fine strategy to sell books and even describe a potential environment that may someday exist. Because such episodes of mass delusion tend to be relatively short-lived even when they do achieve broad currency, one might simply be tempted to wait this one out as well.

The world has not seen this level of global integration since pre- World War I. Granted, Globalization 1.0 turned out pretty poorly for most of the participating countries; and, yes, there may be some truth to his hype claims. However, it is undeniable that there are powerful social and technological trends that underpin this new wave of globalization – namely, unprecedented access to the global communications infrastructure and the ability to participate in the read/write web. In short, globalization is not simply an economic occurrence – for better or worse, it must also be viewed through the lens of its lasting social and cultural impact. As such, I’d urge Mr. Ghemawat not to limit his analysis solely to economic indicators.

Shout-out to my homies in the Islamic Republic of Iran…

To illustrate my point, I had a look at the Google Analytics data for this blog. Yes, I recognize that this is completely unscientific and utterly navel-gazing. Nevertheless, it turns out that that roughly 60% of visitors over the last 90 days were from the US; followed by the UK (9.73%), India (4.89%), Canada (3.93%), Germany (2.36%), Australia (1.33%), Thailand (1.09%), Singapore (.91%), Italy (.91%) and Netherlands (.85%). The top-ten list is not particularly surprising – four of the top ten visitor countries are native English speaking countries (and two others, Singapore and India, have very strong English-based educational systems). However, what I found particularly interesting was The Long Tail of my reach. In the past 90 days, readers from 76 countries including The Islamic Republic of Iran, Zimbabwe and Nigeria have visited the strategyst.

As more than a casual reader of The Economist, I would have thought that these visitors would have more pressing concerns than the random musings of a customer and technology evangelist half a world away. The fact that they do not leads me to believe that there is more to this globalization thing than mere economics.