The Interdependent Crystal Ball

One book is fair-minded, clear, and informative. It is the result of extensive firsthand research that results in a surprising fact or insight on almost every page. The other is overblown and sloppy, misleading on small points and platitudinous on large ones. The product of almost no real research, it says little that readers don’t already know.

You will have guessed by now that the David of this encounter is the better book, and the Goliath the blowsy mess. No one pretends that the bestseller list is a perfect guide to literary merit, but in this case the mismatch of quality and acclaim makes you wonder how much connection the marketplace of books has with the marketplace of ideas.

In the beginning of Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene notify us that because of globalization and other big changes, the 1990s will be “the most important decade in the history of civilization.” To those whose thoughts might wander to the 1940s, the 1910s, the 1770s, the 1590s, the 0s, or other contenders for the title, the authors explain just why the 1990s will be so special: “It will be a decade like none that has come before, because it will culminate in the millennium, the year 2000.” Still not convinced?

The year 2000 is operating like a powerful magnet on humanity, reaching down into the 1990s and intensifying the decade. It is amplifying emotions, accelerating change, heightening awareness, and compelling us to reexamine ourselves, our values, and our institutions.

This is all on the first page, and it is a quite faithful indicator of the literary, intellectual, and evidentiary standards the authors will observe throughout the book.

In Entangling Alliances, John Maxwell Hamilton, a former foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, also begins by saying that the 1990s will be different—but, unlike Naisbitt and Aburdene, he gives an idea of what they will be different from. Global interdependence, in the sense of one culture’s vulnerability to influence from abroad, is not something that was invented with the OPEC cartel or the astronauts’ famous photo of Spaceship Earth, he says. The modern “narco-interdependence” among Colombia, Panama, and the United States bears a piquant resemblance to the nineteenth-century pattern that connected India, where opium was grown, Britain, whose merchants shipped and sold it, and China, where the hapless addicts lived. “The specter of countries defaulting on their foreign debt, a fear today with Third World countries, has also roamed through many centuries,” Hamilton says.

In the 19th century the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana, and Mississippi defaulted on foreign loans; America, wrote an English lender, was “a nation with whom no contract can be made, because none can be kept.”

Like Naisbitt and Aburdene, Hamilton goes on to say that international connections are becoming closer, quicker, and more complicated year by year. Louisiana’s nineteenth-century default had no impact at all on the Japanese economy, whereas all markets in the world are linked now. But his book, unlike Megatrends 2000, helps us start sorting out which kinds of interdependence we should welcome and which may prove troublesome.

That was fine as far as it went. But the technique contains one huge pitfall, which Naisbitt edged around when writing the first Megatrends but has fallen into head first this time. It is one thing to follow trends in the clipping stacks as an indication of what the nation’s editors—and, by extension, their readers—have on their minds. It is something quite different to use the content of the clippings to show what is actually going on in the world. Researchers might watch Saturday-morning TV in order to see what children are learning about violence, comedy, sex roles, and what have you. When they start drawing conclusions about Cro-Magnon man from The Flintstones, they’re in trouble. Megatrends 2000, which covers a number of trends besides interdependence, is one long exhibition of Flintstone-fallacy thinking. The newspaper and newsmagazine clips that are Naisbitt and Aburdene’s primary source aren’t deliberately fanciful, like a cartoon, but most were written under deadline and many are out of date. Because the authors have so few facts of their own to work with, they know only as much or as little as they’re able to transcribe.

As a result, Megatrends2000 is chockfull of seemingly precise and specific secondhand data, used to shore up assertions that are often meaningless or false. “In 1986 and 1987 about 35 percent of all trade between the United States and Asia passed through California ports,” the authors tell us, in a sentence they consider so important that they print the whole thing in bold face. For anyone who has looked at a map, the only possible reaction is, So what? “For 122 million well-off Japanese, mineral water has become a new necessity.” The “122 million”—not 120 million, not 125—is meant to lend an air of accuracy, but “well-off” spins the sentence out into a realm of assertion and falsehood that the authors don’t even realize they’ve entered. Is this an impressive way of saying that all Japanese are well off? If so, it’s wrong. Does it mean that 122 million of the roughly 125 million people in Japan are well off? If so, it’s unexplained. That mineral water is a “necessity” would come as news to almost any Japanese person I’ve ever met. Naisbitt and Aburdene tell us that the “Datsun” corporation writes its international memos in English, which demonstrates how popular and powerful English has become as the language of world business. Although the Nissan corporation used to produce Datsun-model cars, it hasn’t used that name for several years, and there has never been a Datsun company. Talking about the Datsun corporation is like talking about the Beetle corporation and the cute little cars it makes in Germany. It’s no wonder that Naisbitt and Aburdene veer back and forth between spurious secondhand precision (“Each day 200 varieties of cheese are down to the United States from France”) and vapid “the future lies ahead”—style conclusions. They don’t have enough contact with their material to be able to do anything else.

Hamilton takes just the opposite approach, examining a small number of cases in great detail and letting the facts steer the reader toward conclusions. His book consists of three separate works of reportage, each of which concentrates on one developing country and one kind of interdependence.

The first is set in the Philippines and concerns the services sector, that formless economic category that includes all activities from cutting hair to writing songs. Service businesses are usually thought to be more geographically restrained than manufacturing (it cost me only $2.80 to get a good haircut when I was living in Kuala Lumpur, but it’s not worth going there when I need one). Hamilton, though, says that some services can, like factories, be moved from country to country in search of cheaper labor.

The data-entry business is a leading example of how mobile the service sector has become. Developed societies have a tremendous appetite for data—each credit-card transaction must somehow wind up in the right account—but entering the data is tiresome and expensive. Hamilton tells the story of Saztec, an American-based company that has specialized in moving data entry to places where people are eager for the jobs, especially the Philippines. Every day or two, cartons full of data on paper or microfilm leave America and Europe by airplane. In Manila, Saztec’s Philippine workers sit at computers keying in all sorts of information:

names and addresses of Stride Rite shoe clients in the United States; switching networks for the Mountain Bell and Pacific Bell telephone systems; articles in Playboy and the Christian Science Monitor; U.S. presidential speeches; French novels; European patent records; and the Helsinki, Finland, National Library book catalogue.

The computer files produced in Manila go back to their homeland via satellite or modem transmission, or on magnetic disks or tape.

The setting for Hamilton’s second study is Costa Rica, the home not only of Central America’s most stable democracy but also of one of its most varied rain forests. (“Holland, which is flat, has a single ‘life zone’ as defined by one common classification of ecosystems. . . . Costa Rica has 12, the same as all of the United States east of the Mississippi.”) The chapter describes the interactions among modern agriculture and medicine (which have allowed the population to soar), debt (which pressures poor countries to “develop” forest land), and new scientific and commercial interest in the genetic diversity of the rain forest. The third section, set in Kenya, explores human interaction, especially the impact of tourism on Kenya’s culture and environment. Hamilton points out, in one of hundreds of enlightening vignettes, that the OPEC price boom was indirectly responsible for part of the devastation of rhino herds. Citizens of North Yemen, awash in new money, tried all at once to satisfy their lifelong desire for daggers with rhino-horn handles.

The very word “interdependence” implies a kind of symmetry—we can help each other up, or we can pull each other down. In environmental matters that idea may be correct. Indeed, if there is any real hope for a transnational sense of the brotherhood of man, it may come from an environmental disaster that makes us feel we’re all on the same side, fighting a common foe.

But economic interdependence does not necessarily work in the same evenhanded way. Hamilton says that until now the data-entry business has created a constructive form of interdependence between Americans and Filipinos. But, he adds, the whole industry might suddenly disappear in the next few years, as soon as optical-scanning devices can eliminate the need for keying jobs. When that happens, Hamilton implies, the American entrepreneurs who started the Philippine company will be in a much better position than the Filipinos they have employed, because the American economy gives them more chances to bounce back.

Naisbitt and Aburdene, like many other theorists of what’s often called the “new borderless era,”gloss over the possibility that interdependence can create plain old one-sided dependeney. Their book illustrates the two standard ways to avoid this conclusion. One is to say that these days you just can’t tell where one nation’s interests end and another’s begin ("Economic nationalism is dead. We are all part of one economy now”). The other is to argue that even if you could tell them apart, various nations’ interests would naturally balance themselves out. Americans may buy lots of cars from Japan, but “Denny’s, Mister Donuts [sic], Dunkin’ Donuts, and Wendy’s all have become a part of the Japanese lifestyle.”

The automatic-balance argument does not stand up well to scrutiny. American brand names are familiar in Japan and Europe, but usually the logo itself is the only American part of the enterprise. Relying on Dunkin’ Donuts to demonstrate economic parity is like telling a Mexican official that the spread of Taco Bell outlets in the United States offsets the influence that Ford or GE can exercise in Mexico.

Of course the United States is “dependent” on countries like Mexico and the Philippines. Poor, troubled nations have an essentially negative power—to permit the flow of drugs, let revolution spill over their borders, seize foreign assets, default on loans. You could say that this makes rich and poor countries interdependent, but there’s no question which side of the dependency bargain—the one making loans or the one threatening not to repay them—any society would prefer to be on.

Being on the right side of the bargain depends on factors that Hamilton briefly outlines and Naisbitt and Aburdene largely ignore: the internal qualities of education, motivation, social justice, and cohesion in which America has been strong but just now seems to be faltering. It would be nice if the year 2000 really did operate like a “powerful magnet” and attract our attention to them.