The Road to Global Prosperity
Coming off his best-seller That Used to Be Us (2011), cowritten with Thomas L. Friedman, Mandelbaum makes the case that globalization is a good thing and will lead to greater prosperity for everyone across the board. At least that’s what he claims the spread of free-market economies will produce in the long run. In the meantime, he spends most of the book describing the pitfalls and challenges that the world is facing and has faced for the past two decades: financial bubbles and meltdowns like the 2007–08 financial crisis initiated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, major disruptions to the job market caused by outsourcing, the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming, and the troubled history of the euro with the spread of debt contagion in Europe. Despite all these obstacles, Mandelbaum maintains that global economic expansion and cooperation will supplant war as countries like Brazil, China, India, and Russia come to realize more and more how their financial future is interdependent on the prosperity of others. Evidently, we’ll all be the richer for it. --David Siegfried