Work requires longer hours, jobs are less secure, and pressures to spend more intense. Consumption-induced environmental damage remains pervasive, and we are in the midst of widespread failures of public provision. We save too little and spend too much trying to keep up not just with the Joneses next door but with the high-flying folks we see on TV and on the pages of In Style magazine. Imagine a world in which taking the train to work got someone the respect that driving a Lexus does now. It is the system that has replaced the old Cold War system, and, like that Cold War system, globalization has its own rules and logic that today directly or indirectly influence the politics, environment, geopolitics and economics of virtually every country in the world.
Today there is only free-market vanilla and North Korea.
There can be different brands of free-market vanilla . But one road. When your country recognizes this fact, when it recognizes the rules of the free market in today's global economy, and decides to abide by them, it puts on what I call the Golden Straitjacket. The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of this globalization era. Mexican, Polish, German, Spanish, Chinese and British headlines, among others, echoed Japanese feelings.