Ian Bremmer

This review is based on the Blinkist version of the book...thus a summary and my review needs to be qualified as such. Presumably the original full text has much more details and research.....but it also takes much longer to read. If I like the Blinkist version, I might seek out and read the full book.
Globalism has created economic winners and losers and an “us vs. them” mentality. For decades, Western political leaders have promoted globalism: the flow of ideas, commerce, services and people across borders. But there have also been many losers, as companies have moved jobs abroad or simply automated them. Since 1979, for example, the US has lost almost 40 percent of its factory jobs......In 1970, middle-income households earned 62 percent of income in the United States. In 2014, that number was 43 percent......A growing sense of economic insecurity is driving dissatisfaction, and, in turn, populist movements. For example, polling conducted in 2015 found that only 6 percent of people in the United States, 4 percent in Britain and 3 percent in France believed the state of the world was getting better.
Populist politicians of the left and right are tapping into this sense of frustration with an “us vs. them" message. It sets "us" against "them"–"us" being the working and middle classes, and "them" being elites, immigrants, or both. Trump was able to talk plainly to voters angry that their factories were shuttered, and jobs lost; while bankers in New York and politicians in Washington appeared to thrive, and Mexican and other Latin American immigrants found new opportunities.
Globalism has enhanced cultural anxieties in many countries....In many countries, concerns about immigration are driving frustration and huge political upheaval. The proportion of UK residents born outside Britain rose from 3.8 million in 1993 to 8.7 million in 2015, [That’s not a proportion it’s just a number and not very meaningful without knowing what proportion of the population that represents. I’ve done the calculations it was 6.7% of the population in 1993 and 14% in 2015]...more than doubling as a result of the European Union’s system of free movement for people. [But compare that with Australia where 31% were born outside Australia as at 2023]...In Germany, 1.1 million migrants applied for asylum in 2015 and 2016 alone. The resulting societal concerns were the prime reason for Alternative for Germany becoming, in 2017, the first far-right party to win seats in the German parliament since World War II...Overall, hostility to immigration and foreigners has risen, and the underlying trends are likely to continue. In 2016 there were over 65 million people living as refugees around the world, and there are few signs of any political solutions that can make that number go down....Rising immigration, combined with an economy and society that feels more fragile than ever for middle-and working-class people, means that populism in Europe, the United States and other developed nations will continue to rise.
According to official state figures, Despite State crackdowns, the number of protests in China rose from 8,700 in 1993 to over 127,000 in 2010. At that point, the state stopped publishing the numbers. These protests were driven by a mixture of economic, environmental and political concerns either caused by or made worse by globalization. It’s estimated that one million Chinese people are killed by air pollution every year, causing understandable anger. In December 2016, people in the smog-filled city of Chengdu in China started placing pollution masks on the faces of statues in the city, and protestors took to social media holding photos that said, “let me breathe.”.....Turkey has been a globalism success story. The proportion of Turkish people living in poverty dropped dramatically, from 30 percent to 1.6 percent between 2002 and 2014. But the country’s new middle class still has reasons to be dissatisfied......In 2012, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised that average income would rise to $25,000 by 2023. But by 2016, it stalled at just under $11,000.......Failure to provide for public services can trigger massive outcries, as we’ve seen elsewhere. In 2013, in São Paulo in Brazil, a nine-cent increase in local transport fares–felt to be symptomatic of an inadequate, corrupt government–sparked huge protests across the whole country.
Economic inequality is a major problem in the world today...In the United States, the top 1 percent of adults earned 27 times what the bottom 50 percent earned in 1981. But come 2016, the 1 percent earned a massive 81 times more than the bottom half of the population.
It only takes the richest man in Nigeria one day to earn more than 8,000 times what a poor Nigerian spends on their basic needs in a whole year. [Taking a total outlier like this doesn’t really show the whole story].....Russia’s political and economic elite has grown extraordinarily wealthy, and 24 percent of the country’s wealth is held offshore, where it can’t be taxed to fund public services. And, for comparison, the gap between rich and poor in Russia is wider today than in almost every OECD country......Naturally, people become frustrated if they feel they are working hard for little return when they can see political and economic elites doing extraordinarily well.
In the US, an analysis by data-crunchers FiveThirtyEight based on publicly available FBI data found that income inequality “stood out” as a predictor of hate crimes. Both before and after the last presidential election, states with higher inequality were more likely to have higher levels of hate crime [what about crime in general?].....
The rise of robots and technological innovation is threatening job creation and opportunity. It took half a century for the world’s first million industrial robots to be installed. It will only take eight years to install the second million....A 2017 study from the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis said that by 2035, almost every large American city will see half its current jobs replaced by automation.....Economic theory has long indicated that the overall impact of automation is positive.....less hard work and greater productivity. But in 2017, researchers at MIT and Boston University found evidence that contradicts this theory. They found that robots had taken 670,000 manufacturing jobs from 1990 to 2007. But the lost jobs hadn’t been replaced–new, higher-value jobs for humans just weren’t being created quickly enough......As low-skilled and medium-skilled jobs are lost to robots, people will need higher levels of education.......But a laid-off automobile worker in Detroit might be looking at a bleak future–his job lost to robots and no money to pay for the education to survive in the new, automated world.......Education is expensive. Tuition costs in the United States are rising at 6 percent per year, according to financial firm Vanguard. At this rate, a four-year college degree for an American born in 2017 will cost $215,000 at a public school and $500,000 at a private one.
Emerging nations are both more vulnerable to automation and less able to respond to it. United Nations forecasts show that 47 percent of jobs in the United States are at risk from machine learning and automation. But if that sounds bad, consider the figures for emerging countries. In Nigeria, 65 percent are threatened. In India, it’s 69 percent, and in China, 77 percent........Emerging economies have a higher proportion of jobs at risk to automation, and larger, younger populations to take care of. So they are much more vulnerable to the problems of automation. Many also lack the ability to respond to it effectively.....Rich countries like the United States or South Korea can afford to invest in high-quality education systems. But a country like South Africa has multiple issues where the end result is a government that doesn’t have the money to invest in the education or research and development that could prepare South Africa’s economy and population for changes to come. Exacerbating the problem, populists–like populists the world over–increasingly pin the blame on foreigners........The future risk is that, as rich countries manage the impact of the tech revolution, countries like South Africa or Egypt, Indonesia or Venezuela, will get left behind.
Governments and people are erecting new walls in response to populist concerns....Very often, governments are reacting against globalism’s openness, erecting new barriers to manage the flow of goods, information and people.....Today, Donald Trump is the global standard-bearer for resurgent economic protectionism.......UN figures for the number of non-tariff barriers to trade among southeast Asian countries have risen from 1,634 in 2000 to around 6,000 in 2015. [some of this may be attributed to better reporting mechanisms].
Governments are also erecting walls to stop the flow of information. Sometimes these walls are quite literal. China incarcerated 38 journalists in 2016, while Turkey imprisoned 81. But an even more efficient way to shut down flows of information is simply to turn off the internet. The Egyptian government became the first to shut off its country’s internet
Finally, barriers to people are growing. According to the Economist, more than 40 countries have built fences or walls against their neighbors since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989....It seems very likely that governments will get pickier about the immigrants they let in.......As the focus of immigration shifts away from lower-skilled workers, entry rights may increasingly be up for sale. In the US, for example, visa programs already allow rich foreigners easier access to green cards if they invest in real estate.
Governments dealing with globalism need to reconsider the relationship between state and citizen........many people today have higher expectations of their social contract, or the expectations they can have of their government. They expect the right to education, transport infrastructure, safe drinking water, medical care and the ability to access the internet among other things.......so governments need to think carefully about the social contract in a way that is meaningful in a globalized world.
A key part of this should be education, which now has to be a lifelong process.....In Singapore, a government body called Workforce Singapore helps businesses retrain their staff, develop new skills and remain valuable to the company. The Singaporean government also provides every citizen aged over 25 with an "individual learning account"
Governments will also need to rethink tax. An automated workforce means fewer incomes to tax. Bill Gates has proposed a tax on robots to fund worker retraining and the welfare costs of those displaced from work.......Others, particularly in Europe, are considering the idea of a universal basic income, in which everyone, rich or poor, receives a modest income from the state.
What is clear today is that the forces of globalism still have the potential to disrupt societies. Trump voters, protestors on the streets of China and European populists may all be angry–and they often have good reasons to be. The process of reinventing the social contract may not be easy. But in the long run, it’s a better approach than building more walls.
The key message It’s not hard to dislike populists like Trump. But he didn’t create the us vs. them world that made his election possible. Many people in America, Europe and the developing world want change. And they feel that political and economic elites do not understand the real impacts of globalism. If we don’t take these people seriously, there are major problems ahead for society and for politics.
My take on the book. It certainly raises some serious issues and draws attention to increasing inequality and the dangers this represent. I don’t disagree with the solutions suggested but feel that a much higher proportion of the book could have been devoted to the “light at the end of the tunnel” rather than describing the problem. Four stars from me.… (more)

The Power of Crisis deserves a high rating thanks to the author. Ian Bremmer, a prominent political scientist, is articulate and concise about where trends are pointing to. He does this in all his books in general and it's especially true in The Power of Crisis.

The world is shifting all around us. The COVID pandemic shook up the global economy and it's difficult to tell whether trends are going to return to the relatively peaceful times of the 2010's or if we're going to continue to shift towards another kind of global economy.… (more)

This book was a wild ride. I normally steer clear of alarmist-sounding arguments (or book titles for that matter) but I'm glad I kept reading because the arguments within Us vs. Them are grounded in fact, well presented, and have historical precedent. I also wasn't familiar with the author, Ian Bremmer, but now I consider myself a fan.

I feel like I've been saying this for 20 years, but it feels just as relevant now that we are at a crossroads in our Age of Globalism. Will we sort through all of the competing incentives threatening to undo our global progress, or will it all be undone regardless? It's difficult to predict but expanding on what I said above life since the start of the 21st century has been a wild ride.… (more)

The 3 global threats geopolitical consultant Bremmer addresses are (1) health and pandemics, (2) climate change, and (3) uncontrolled technology and AI. Preliminarily, he discusses (a) the wide and bitter gulf between the 2 political cultures within the US and (b) the risk of US/China relations sliding into a cold war, believing that progress on these 2 fronts is essential for the 3 threats to be effectively tackled. Under threat #3, he gives privacy issues their due and proposes creation of a World Data Organization analogous to the WTO and the IPCC. He manages to conclude with perhaps more optimism than is justified.… (more)