End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation [Hardcover]

Barry C. Lynn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 16, 2005

In September 1999, an earthquake devastated much of Taiwan, toppling buildings, knocking out electricity, and killing 2,500 people. Within days, factories as far away as California and Texas began to close. Cut off from their supplies of semiconductor chips, companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard began to shutter assembly lines and send workers home. A disaster that only a decade earlier would have been mainly local in nature almost cascaded into a grave global crisis. The quake, in an instant, illustrated just how closely connected the world had become and just how radically different are the risks we all now face.

End of the Line is the first real anatomy of globalization. It is the story of how American corporations created a global production system by exploding the traditional factory and casting the pieces to dozens of points around the world. It is the story of how free trade has made American citizens come to depend on the good will of people in very different nations, in very different regions of the world. It is a story of how executives and entrepreneurs at such companies as General Electric, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, and Flextronics adapted their companies to a world in which America’s international policies were driven ever more by ideology rather than a focus on the long-term security and well-being of society.

Politicians have long claimed that free trade creates wealth and fosters global stability. Yet Lynn argues that the exact opposite may increasingly be true, as the resulting global system becomes ever more vulnerable to terrorism, war, and the vagaries of nature. From a lucid explanation of outsourcing’s true impact on American workers to an eye-opening analysis of the ideologies that shape free-market competition, Lynn charts a path between the extremes of left and right. He shows that globalization can be a great force for spreading prosperity and promoting peace—but only if we master its complexities and approach it in a way that protects and advances our national interest.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The problem with globalized outsourcing, former Global Business executive editor Lynn warns, is that "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere," as when a 2003 earthquake in Taiwan halted semiconductor manufacturing for a week, negatively affecting American electronics firms. National security, he argues, is jeopardized by this "hyperspecialized and hyper-rigid production system" as well; for Lynn, until the NAFTA-izing Bill Clinton came along, our trade policy had been for two centuries designed to prevent such potential catastrophes. Lynn has a knack for finding attractive, easy-to-grasp models from the contemporary business scene—such as using Dell's rise in the 1990s to explain the triumph of logistics management—but readers sometimes have to wade through heavy doses of economic theory to get to the livelier sections. Though some might view his concerns as excessively alarmist, Lynn delivers a welcome new facet to the antiglobalization debate, moving well beyond the stale "corporations are evil" argument to lay out a worrying economic overview.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

About globalization Lynn observes, "Our corporations have built the most efficient system of production the world has even seen, perfectly calibrated to a world in which nothing bad ever happens." Yet, bad things happen all the time, from natural disasters and wars to human error. The American people are relying on a global industrial system, which has serious structural flaws, and Lynn offers a thought-provoking perspective on the system's winners and those at risk. We learn that while academics, investors, and customers view the global production system with enthusiasm, it is a disaster for many, including pension and health-insurance beneficiaries, and it shifts the power over wages and work environment from workers to investors. In reality we already live in a global system, and the author recommends using economic tools to correct the system's failings. Since we are participants in a production system that is not controlled by any one company or any one country, this will be a challenge. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (August 16, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385510241
• ISBN-13: 978-0385510240
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,049,176 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In his first book - End of the Line (2005) - Barry wrote a pathbreaking study of industrial systems made "Too Big to Fail" and of the dangers of overly extreme interdependence among nations. The Washington Post called End of the Line "Tom Friedman for grown-ups" and Ha Joon Chang compared that work to the writings of John Kenneth Galbraith. In Cornered, Barry takes an explosive look at how financiers use their powers in ways that destroy jobs, crush independent businesses, hobble innovation, degrade safety, harm our environment, and, most dangerous of all, threaten the political foundations of our democratic republic. Barry is director of the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Project, and a senior fellow, at the New America Foundation. He has presented his work to high officials in Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Taiwan, and the European Commission, as well as the White House and U.S. Treasury.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

66 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Laissez Faire Economics and Unregulated Plumbing, August 31, 2005

By 

Marcellus Andrews (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (Hardcover)

Barry Lynn's End of the Line is a superb volume that shows why economic analysis should not be left to economists. There are several occupational hazards of being an economist, the most irksome being that you have to pretend that politics and economics are not only different but actually separate. This sort of thinking is fine when one is engaged in a certain type of scientific economics - the dispassionate explanation of an aspect of our economic arrangements - but is a disaster when it comes to explaining real life economies. Market societies, for better and worse, are the product of deeply rooted economic imperatives that play out against institutions built in political - power - struggles between people with opposing interests and disparate means to achieve their ends. Economies are jerry-rigged, improvised institutions that sometimes work well and sometimes work very, very badly. Because Lynn is not an economist, he is less inclined to worship at the altar of free markets and more inclined to look at how the self-interested actions of leading business men and women, government officials and the general public combine to create risk as well as opportunity in our global economic commons. Lynn's lack of free market piety will earn him critics among the acolytes of laissez faire economics, but the rest of us should be grateful that he writes about the real world in these confusing times.

Lynn's point in End of the Line is to remind us that the global economy is, like all human creations, a grand improvisation that creates and distributes wealth in ways that are beyond the control of its designers in business and government. Lynn has penned a wise, witty and at times angry look at globalization that departs from the stale argument about whether global capitalism is good or bad in favor of a far more subtle, and scary portrait of a risk laden production system that is, at least for now, beyond any government's control. End of the Line is a meditation on what happens when short term self-interest leads global businesses to make bottom line decisions that enhance their own profitability in ways that increase the vulnerability of the system as a whole, and governments abdicate their responsibility to monitor and manage an economy - even a global economy - for the sake of the common good.

Lynn asks us to see the global economy as a vast and intricate system of economic plumbing that links suppliers and customers in every corner of the globe. This plumbing system is nothing but an ever evolving set of connections that becomes denser when corporations outsource their operations to producers in lower cost countries in order to provide customers with high quality products at low prices. The global growth of free trade, with relatively little regulation or oversight by governments in the interest of global prosperity, has been an immense boon to the fortunes of millions of previously desperately people around the world, whose incomes and life chances have blossomed because they are making goods and services that people in rich countries want and need.

Yet, common sense tells us that an unregulated plumbing system, left to grow by itself without any supervision or rules, is bound to develop all sorts of problems that mushroom into total system failure under the wrong circumstances. Imagine the eventual public health disaster that would happen in a city that let all building and homeowners make their own connections to the main water and sewer lines. The resulting mess would poison our water and cities with filth because no agent was responsible for managing the system in the interest of the community as a whole. A smooth flow of water and sewage requires regulation of the rational plumbing system in order for everyone to prosper from the use of water and the proper management of waste.

End of the Line makes an urgent yet curiously under-appreciated point: The contemporary global economy is a very leaky plumbing system that is subject to catastrophic breakdown because its evolution is driven by the private interests of global corporate managers rather than the common good. This leaky plumbing system is the result of a deliberate choice by the global government - the United States - to refrain from managing the world economy in our nation's interests in favor of a utopian vision of a planet wide free market that would regulate itself, and thereby eventually enrich the world. Lynn has bad news for all who believe that the free market is all the world needs to have peace, security and stability: the breakdown of the global economy's plumbing will lead to the same kind of mess as an unregulated system of city plumbing unless we are smart enough to realize that a free market requires a strong, smart and wise government to deftly manage the world economy with a light but competent touch.

End of the Line is not an anti-globalization screed about how global capitalism is destroying the world's poorest people, or poisoning our environment, or generating corruption on an epic scale. Instead, Lynn wants to alert us to the fact that we have created a global economy where a natural disaster or political conflict could disrupt the entire system in ways that threaten the well-being, or in extreme cases, the lives of millions of people. The culprit here is the old conflict between the private and the public interest, this time played out on a global scale. Lynn wants us to see how our love affair with the free market has, inadvertently but predictably, created economic insecurity that can only be handled by government or governments.

The lesson that Lynn drives home is clear and difficult to avoid: either the leading power in the global economy - the United States - will step up to the task of managing capitalism in its own interest in light of its sense of the legitimate interests of the rest of the world or some other power will take over global leadership. If, no when, the global system's plumbing breaks down in the future, some nations or group of nations will fix the resulting mess, and promulgate rules and regulations to reduce the likelihood of system failure in the future. The US cannot afford to wait so long that some other power or powers, with the approval of the rest of the world, offer a credible alternative vision for managing the global economic system in light of their own interests as well as their understanding of our interests. Such a circumstance is a sure road to conflict - hot or cold, or both.

End of the Line is also an announcement of a new type of American economic nationalism, where Lynn makes a case for a strong American role in the management of the global economy in the interest of the American people. According to Lynn, the threats to global economic security and American prosperity are the result of the deliberate policies of the Clinton administration, which foolishly downgraded the role of the US government in building and managing global trade in favor of free market ideologies that ignore the historical fact that markets function best when governments intervene with the right mix of wisdom and restraint. The Clinton administration portrayed in End of the Line looks less like the interventionist, big government liberals bent on supplanting free markets with government power in the interest of some idea of justice or the social good and more like a successor to the Reagan/Bush the Elder administrations' project of restraining and rolling back the New Deal in favor of the revival of capitalism "red in tooth and claw". Sections of End of the Line suggest that Clinton and his associates are better seen as the second of three successive Bush administrations - with Clinton et al as the not-well-loved but useful adopted children of the Elder Bush and disdained siblings of Bush the Younger - bent on rationalizing and consolidating the Reagan revolution against a strong US government in economic affairs. This indictment, which will outrage as many Democrats as Republicans, is essentially right: Clinton was the kinder, gentler Bush whose paternalistic worries about the common man and woman never deflected him from the path of opening the US economy to the gales of creative destruction and globalization which drive growing income disparities at home and, according to Lynn, increasing economic insecurity in the global economy overall. Lynn treats Clinton and the Democrats of his era as people who try to soften the blow that the global march toward capitalism must deliver to weak Americans rather than a force trying to create a new social contract that spread the fruits of wealthy widely while preparing us all to live a very competitive economic world.

This book is, among other things, a powerful salvo in the war between Democrats over the future of the party, and therefore the nature of progressive politics in this country. Let the fight over the future of the Democratic Party - or more likely, its successor - begin in earnest.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Global Diversification Re-examined, February 19, 2006

By 

Craig L. Howe "The Pointed Pundit" (Darien, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (Hardcover)

On September 21, 1999 an earthquake that registered 7.6 rocked Taiwan. Despite the death toll of 2,400, the quake barely registered in the consciousness of most Americans.

Watching the news would lead even the most cosmopolitan American observer to conclude that people in this country were more interested in North Carolina. Hurricane Floyd dropped more than 28 inches of rain there the week before.

Yet the shock wave from the quake was felt within days. Xilinx, a highly-specialized American semiconductor designer and manufacturer, lost two of its factories that day in Taiwan. Soon, thousands of assembly-line workers located from California to Texas, were furlogued.

The chain reaction did not stop there. Wall Street traders began to place the Taiwanese natural disaster in its proper prospective. Shares of Dell, Apple and Hewlett-Packard began to tumble.

By Christmas, American shoppers were scurrying to avoid the shortages of laptop computers, Barbie cash registers and Furby dolls.

In short a disaster that only 10 years prior would have been a localized disaster, cascaded into a worldwide crisis. The Taiwanese earthquake had elevated itself into a symbol of how closely connected the world has become. Perhaps, more important, Barry Lynn, a fellow at the New American Foundation in Washington, D. C. illustrates how that out-sourced world faces different risks.

Lynn argues today's worldwide economy is an improvisation that creates and distributes wealth in ways beyond the control of its designers.

In this well-written and well-researched monograph is an at times angry look at globalization. It offers a departure from the now familiar argument that interconnected, worldwide capitalism is good. In its place, the author offers a subtle and often scary look at a risk-laden system beyond any government's control.

Lynn's arguments promise to add clarity to this nation's growing global debate.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The World, She's a rounda lika my head!, February 22, 2006

By 

Skylark Thibedeau "Semper Memento Audere" (Charlotte, NC USA, Terra, Solaris System, Milky Way Galaxy.) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation (Hardcover)

The flip side of "The World is Flat". While US Companies are sending jobs overseas to "Cubicle Coolies" in Third World Countries for a short term return to investors and the CEO's yacht funding, American workers suffer. In the long term US companies must rely on the good will of Pakistan not to nuke their call centers in India over the Kashmir.

Lynn's book is a good look at the mindset of International Corporations who like the media today do not look at themselves as American but as World citizens. To save a little money American corporations since NAFTA have started moving jobs overseas. To justify this they are claiming they are fighting terrorism by increasing the standard of living in the third world. A $300 a month tech in India may be as good as his american counterpart in the US making $4000 but a GI Joe with Kung Fu grip costs as much in Hylalabad as it does in LA. Their standard of living isn't going to rise too much.

Lynn argues that Globalization rather than decreasing our vulnerability to terrorists is actually increasing it as means of production are moved closer to hot spot areas and Companies are dependant on third world despots (and probably the US military) to protect their interests.

He relates how both parties in the US are in bed together on the issue of globalization. He relates that the free trade positions of both Bush Administrations and that of Bill Clinton were almost in lock step. It makes one wonder if there is a politicl solution out there.

The book is very scary and I would reccomend it to those who need a reply to some of the rah rah Pro Globalization books out there.