The World is Flat
About the Lecture
Chances are good that Bhavya in Bangalore will read your next x-ray, or as Thomas Friedman learned first hand, “Grandma Betty in her bathrobe” will make your Jet Blue plane reservation from her Salt Lake City home. In “Globalization 3.0,” Friedman contends, people from far-flung places will become principal players in the marketplace.
In his latest book, The World is Flat, Friedman describes the unplanned cascade of technological and social shifts that effectively leveled the economic world, and “accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda next-door neighbors.” Today, “individuals and small groups of every color of the rainbow will be able to plug and play.” Friedman’s list of “flatteners” includes the fall of the Berlin Wall; the rise of Netscape and the dotcom boom that led to a trillion dollar investment in fiber optic cable; the emergence of common software platforms and open source code enabling global collaboration; and the rise of outsourcing, offshoring, supply chaining and insourcing. Friedman says these flatteners converged around the year 2000, and “created a flat world: a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly, language.” At the very moment this platform emerged, three huge economies materialized — those of India, China and the former Soviet Union –“and three billion people who were out of the game, walked onto the playing field.” A final convergence may determine the fate of the U.S. in this final chapter of globalization. A “political perfect storm,” as Friedman describes it — the dotcom bust, the attacks of 9/11, and the Enron scandal — “distract us completely as a country.” Just when we need to face the fact of globalization and the need to compete in a new world, “we’re looking totally elsewhere.”
Constructing a New Liberal Iraq
About the Lecture
Iraq’s oil reserves are the second largest in the world, yet according to both colloquium speakers, the country’s economic prospects are quite dim. They also agree that bungled U.S. reforms share some of the blame for Iraq’s bleak outlook. Robert Looney believes that Washington dearly wants to “make Iraq a showcase for other countries in the Middle East, by showing how a successful market economy could improve standards of living,” among other goals. But policy makers have gone at the problem the wrong way, pushing for immediate outside investment in and ownership of Iraqi assets. “If you were a freshman looking at an economics book and had to write a paper overnight, this is pretty much what you’d come up with.” Instead, reforms have “created unemployment and insecurity” and led to a shadow economy riddled with corruption that seems unlikely to budge for years. Among his scenarios: Iraq might go the way of Iran, becoming a “pragmatic theocracy;” “muddle through” to become “a Nigeria of the Middle East;” or get stuck in a vicious circle, and become a “Yugoslavia with oil.” John Tirman says that “economic growth after 15 years of decline is essential to winning over the Iraqi people,” but the U.S. free market schemes are deepening the distrust Iraqis have in economic reforms, as they observe deals primarily transacted with outsiders. Tirman says this rapid privatization leads to more insecurity, and that if you “want to stabilize the economy, give money to people to live on and make them feel they have a future.” He sees a strong likelihood of civil war, if not between Baathists and Shi’as then between Kurds and Shi’as.
Forecasting Markets: The Capital Update for 2005
About the Lecture
Not a whiff of irrational exuberance escapes from this panel, veterans all of the economic rollercoaster of the 1990s. Carol Vallone, CEO of a well-capitalized, web-based higher learning company, has words of caution and advice on how to build a company to the pre-IPO stage. “Be a category killer in your primary market,” she counsels, so don’t disperse energies into other markets. Focus not on new customers but on “how many customers you can keep.” Also, it’s not the partners with deep pockets who matter the most, but “deep partners” from whom you can borrow technologies, and who lend visibility.
Daphne Dufresne deems 2004 something of a comeback year for venture capital funding. Ninety three companies raised $11 billion in public market – almost half of those companies in information technology, with life sciences a close second. Her predictions the coming year: “Technology will still drive the majority of investment dollars” and a “growing economy will foster open IPO markets and merger and acquisition opportunities.”
Oscar Jazdowski detects a momentum shift – as investors become more confident, debt financing of young, emerging companies will grow. He sees “a phenomenal injection of capital” in businesses with no revenues, and frets about a building debt bubble, “precursor of disaster to come.” Yet he remains bullish on 2005, predicting an 11% increase in the Dow and a 30% increase for the tech heavy NASDAQ.
T.L. Stebbins anticipates a weakening dollar, broadly affecting the economy: “This is getting to a point where people will not continue to invest foreign currencies into the U.S. market.” In spite of massive tax cuts, the U.S. experienced only a “tepid recovery.” Expect higher interest rates, says Stebbins, and economic growth “moderated by financial constraints and a volatile international situation.”
30th Anniversary of The Inter-University Committee on International Migration
About the Lecture
The world needs to come up with a coherent, comprehensive policy on migration, and in short order. Mamphela Ramphele is uniquely positioned to understand and shape such a policy for the new U.N. commission that’s studying the issue. She has recently returned to South Africa after years in Washington, D.C. at the World Bank. According to Ramphele, 200 million-plus people are living outside their countries of origin, and this number is bound to increase, under the pressures of globalization, conflict, and economic imbalances. She cites the relentless stream of news stories about migrants dying or suffering unimaginable ordeals to enter countries illegally, and the often intense, negative reaction of nations to the ceaseless flow of non-native workers across their borders. “The world appears to have reached a turning point in relation to issues of migration and mobility,” says Ramphele. Upper and middle income states “need cheap labor for unattractive jobs and to compensate for a diminishing, aging workforce” and less developed countries fret that their young professionals are departing “to regions that offer higher standards of living” and that their less educated emigrants are treated as second-class citizens or worse. “International migration has become an issue of contention between North and South,” she says. Nations must “come clean and acknowledge the hypocrisy” that allows nations to exploit migrant workers while rejecting basic workers’ rights. Ultimately, says Ramphele, “Migration cannot be adequately managed in isolation from the issues of development, demography and democracy.”
From Lab to Market: Where Technology is Headed—The Research Director’s Point of View
About the Lecture
How do you conduct R&D in a vanguard technology? These three panelists provide varying perspectives on the question. Paul Horn stands by IBM’s longstanding commitment to its 5.5 billion dollar annual research effort, but with some caveats: “It’s all about the speed of flowing new ideas into hardware, software and services,” he says. You can’t think about innovation without also considering “channels to market.” IBM insists that “researchers spend time in the marketplace so they can understand how their technology can solve real world problems.”
At DuPont, Uma Chowdhry cites a “quietly occurring transformation in the area of biobased materials.” At two centuries’ young, DuPont has a new primary challenge: “How do we transform from a petroleum-based economy to renewable resources such as crops?” Working with partners such as MIT, the company is exploring glucose, methane and nanotechnology to cook up new kinds of fuel, food supplements, and other products—all economically. It’s “a very big dream,” acknowledges Chowdhry. The prerequisite, she says, is that “top management must have an unwavering commitment to the mission as well as time, vision and patience.”
Robert Tepper describes the convergence of two revolutions driving his field forward. The complete sequencing of the human genome, combined with advances in understanding pathways of disease, will enable Millennium’s researchers to create “breakthrough therapies.” Scientists are already “making strides in cancer and inflammation,” says Tepper. Millennium is linking up with industry, hospitals and academia, plumbing the genome to learn “why individuals are susceptible to disease.”
