History is Happening Now

Tom Friedman is a bad man.

That’s the consensus of many people on the left who have been reading Friedman’s popular NYT column over the years. It’s an opinion I share. Friedman has never encountered a U.S.-initiated war — not even one — that he didn’t enthusiastically support from his perch at the Times. He was one of the most vocal supporters of the so-called golden straitjacket that the U.S. — through the vehicles of the IMF and World Bank — insisted that developing countries put on, on the theory that (as Larry Summers once put it) “[t]he laws of economics, it’s often forgotten, are like laws of engineering. There’s only one set of laws, and they work everywhere.”

This very narrow and specific set of destructive economic policies is what many mainstream commentators mean when they talk about “globalization”; Friedman characterized those who opposed his favorite policies as “Anarchists and leftover Marxists” who have “produced noise but nothing that has improved anyone’s life.”

Lately though, Friedman has used his column to document a sort of “conversion” to green politics — finding his inner Keynes — expressing his sudden desire for massive government investment in new technologies and intervention into the “free” market. Matt Taibbi, who brilliantly and hilariously tore apart Friedman’s The World is Flat, is on the case again, taking apart the latest masterpiece of Friedmanism, Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

To review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone.

I am saddened to report that Mr. Taibbi, brilliant as he can be, has his analysis wrong in this case. The “golden straitjacket” that Friedman wanted to impose on the rest of the world is not an example of “American-style… development.” It’s actually something like the opposite of American-style development; America was built on massively protectionist and interventionist measures in more or less every major globally competitive industry since the Revolution: from agriculture, to steel production, to the current high-tech economy. We were the world’s greatest intellectual property thieves and advocates of infant-industry protection.

Indeed, most serious economists will admit that the “golden straightjacket” policies that Friedman supported have been an economic disaster from a growth and development perspective; China, the supposed poster child for globalization (in the narrow sense defined above), in fact became successful specifically by flouting the advice of people like Friedman. As Ha-Joon Chang, a smart Korean economist (should we consider him an anarchist or a leftover Marxist?), notes:

The developing countries grew much faster when they used “bad” trade and industrial policies during 1960–1980 than when they used “good” (at least “better”) policies during the following two decades. The obvious solution to this paradox is to accept that the supposedly good policies are actually not good for the developing countries but that the “bad” policies are actually good for them. This gets further confirmation from the fact that these “bad” policies are also the ones that the NDCs [now-developed countries] had pursued when they were developing countries themselves.

When you keep these facts in mind, an obvious line of logic presents itself. “Golden straitjacket” policies lead to slower economic growth than “developmentalist” policies. Slower growth means less consumption. Less consumption leads to less carbon emissions. It is therefore apparent that Friedman’s support for the “golden straightjacket” was always a kind of environmentalism hidden in plain sight — since his support for such policies led directly to less carbon in the atmosphere. Who would have guessed?