Book review: Grave New World

I just finished reading Grave New World, by Stephen King (the senior economic advisor at HSBC, not the horror author). Although, some readers of this book might think it mildly horrifying in a pre-apocalyptic sense. The subtitle is "The end of globalization, and the return of history", which pitches it as antithetical to Francis Fukuyama's famous essay and book The End of History, which is probably very appropriate.

King's narrative is essentially that globalization can, and will, go into reverse. The prophesied mechanisms for this reverse are increasing inequality within countries, increasing migration flows, a loss of credibility in international institutions, and a reduction in US global hegemony as other superpowers (particularly China, but also Russia) rise. To be honest, I really struggled with this book. It is very well written and easy to read, but King's approach is mostly to gather together a lot of contemporary trends, weave a story that seems to link them all together, and propose where all this is leading. I found it overall to be mostly speculative and not very compelling.

However, as I said, it is well written and despite my failure to buy into the overall narrative, there are definitely notable highlights. I really appreciated King's use of political philosophy. In particular, he points to Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, where King notes that Montesquieu argued:

...that a democratic nation state would only survive if the citizens living within its borders thought their own interests were in accord with the interests of the state as a whole... Alternatively, should citizens no longer be willing to place their faith in elected lawmakers and politicians... a democracy would eventually collapse on account of an excessive 'spirit of inequality'...

If globalization is to succeed in a world of nation states, it either needs to retain the support of nation states, or the nation states themselves need to change. Yet if each nation state experiences an increase in Montesquieu's 'spirit of inequality' - thanks to unintended or unexpected effects stemming from globalization - a point may be reached where domestic support for closer integration inevitably falters.

Among other things, King predicts the fall of the Euro currency, NATO, and the European Union within the near future (the epilogue of the book is written as if in 2044, by which time all of those falls have come to pass). Predicting the future is a sucker's game, but King is clearly up to the challenge, and is not shy. The book also has a few blind spots (notwithstanding that it was written in 2017), including the rise of Bitcoin and blockchain (which could have been foreseen four years ago), and then there's this:

Unlike previous superpowers, the US was not so interested in controlling the rest of the world. Instead it played its role as the first among equals...

I guess that could be true, if we first ignore the Korean War, the Vietnam War, American interventions in Central America, Iran and elsewhere, the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, American dominance of the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization, American cultural imperialism, and so on. Your mileage may vary.

Overall, this was an interesting book to read, but I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone who isn't looking to collect a variety of views on the future of globalization.