A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization

A Future Perfect is the first comprehensive examination of the most important revolution of our time–globalization–and how it will continue to change our lives. The authors, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, correspondents for The Economist , won the Financial Times/Booz Allen Hamilton Global Business Book Award on Strategy and Leadership for their previous collaboration, The Witch Doctors . In A Future Perfect , Micklethwait and Wooldridge expand their field of vision in order to analyze, demystify, and expose the global forces reshaping our world, and they detail both the challenge and the hidden promise those forces hold for individuals, businesses, and governments.

Do businesses benefit from going global? Are we creating winner-take-all societies? Will globalization seal the triumph of junk culture? What will happen to individual careers? Gathering evidence from the shantytowns of São Paolo to the boardroom of General Electric, from the troubled Russia-Estonia border to the booming San Fernando Valley sex industry, Micklethwait and Wooldridge mount a powerful, witty, levelheaded defense of globalization.

Along the way, the authors introduce us to the cosmocrats–the members of the elite business, information, and diplomatic class who are creating the new world order. They also identify the three engines of globalization and describe how people are managing and governing in an increasingly global era. As they did in The Witch Doctors , the authors also brilliantly puncture myths and conventional wisdom, separating false hopes from emerging realities.

Incisive, expansive, and optimistic, A Future Perfect is an illuminating tour of the global economy and a fascinating assessment of its potential impact.

From the Hardcover edition.