A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization

by John Micklethwait

  Indeed, the idea of a global elite seems to have ebbed away into a fringe fascination of extremists and conspiracy theorists, the oxymoronic nature of whose views was illustrated neatly by two demonstrators standing outside a recent meeting of Bilderberg, a secretive transatlantic conference of business and political leaders. One man’s sign denounced “the liberal Jewish conspiracy”; his neighbor’s lamented that the world was being run by “a right wing cabal.” Like the old joke about two men claiming to be Jesus, at least one of them must be wrong.

  p. 225 But is the global ruling class destined to remain a figment of the imagination? Globalization is not only tightening the world’s economic links. It is also throwing up an increasingly conspicuous class of people who possess the ideas, connections, and sheer chutzpah to master the international economy. Cosmopolitan in taste and usually Anglo-American in outlook, these are the people who attend business-school weddings around the world, fill up the business-class lounges at international airports, provide the officer ranks of most of the world’s companies and international institutions, and, through their collective efforts, probably do more than anyone else to make the world seem smaller. These cosmocrats are members of a new ruling class—a much more meritocratic ruling class than we have ever seen before, a much broader one, numbering some twenty million people (we will come to the numbers later), and a much more uneasy one, but a ruling class nevertheless.

  There has always been a delay between the economic changes that usher in a new way of life and the formation of a new economic elite. It took decades for the factory owners who wrought the first industrial revolution in Britain to transform themselves from an economic interest group into a self-conscious class, sending their children to the same schools and making sure they married each other’s sisters. The businesspeople who dominated the great American cities took even longer to lift their gazes above purely local affairs: It was not until after the First World War that the ivy leaf and the Porcellian pig became national symbols of upper-class membership, recognized even in Pasadena and Palo Alto. The past two decades of pell-mell globalization is finally beginning to produce a group of people who have the classic characteristics of a class.

  Such a loaded sobriquet requires a little more definition. When most people talk about the winners from globalization, they tend to focus on the superrich: the global tycoons who spend half their lives on private jets. To be sure, such figures are cosmocrats. Yet for every Larry Ellison there are thousands of people like Knapp, Charlie Woo, Marcus de Ferranti, Patrick Wang, or any of the other characters we have met in this book. Many readers of this book probably live equally global lives without the benefits of a private jet.

  Samuel Huntington was close to the mark when he dubbed this “Davos man,” but that definition—limited as it is to chief executives and people who prick up their ears at the letters IMF—seems far too narrow. You can get a much better idea of rank-and-file cosmocrats by skipping the bigwigs at Davos and scanning the enormous MIPCOM film market in Los Angeles—where thousands of entertainment hustlers from all around the world p. 226 gather to sell their products with remarkably homogeneous insincerity—or dropping in on Comdex, a similar high-tech trade show in Las Vegas.

  On the other hand, the definition of a cosmocrat is much tighter than just “somebody who has prospered from globalization.” Cosmocrats are defined by their attitudes and lifestyles rather than just their bank accounts. That separates them from the widest class of winners from globalization, who are simply local people who have plugged into global networks—everybody from small businesspeople such as the Madini brothers in Tangiers to the hapless consumers in New Delhi finally tasting proper Coca-Cola. In fact, there is a class of emerging-market tycoons—one could call them localcrats—who have prospered precisely because globalization has not been as complete as the cosmocrats would like. Li Ka-shing, for instance, has rented out plenty of buildings in Hong Kong to cosmocrats; he has competed against them; he has hired them to run parts of his empire; and he has even fathered a couple of them. But unlike for his mobile phone–obsessed, business school–trained sons, his commercial (and, one suspects, psychological) heartland remains the Hong Kong property market.

  So who are the cosmocrats? The backbone of the group is still provided by people such as Knapp: the loyal retainers of sprawling multinationals. But many of its members work for companies that have few resources other than a bright idea and a modem connection (at the end of the 1990s, nearly one in six M.B.A.s in America were joining start-ups of one sort or another); and many cosmocrats work for themselves. Some of the stereotypes are obvious: the young overworked lawyer whose social life consists of watching Sex and the City; the connected people whom Wired has dubbed “Digital Citizens” and “MTV man”—those leathery figures who fill the upper-class section of Virgin Atlantic flights between Los Angeles and London; the young Taiwanese “astronauts” who take the China Airlines red-eye that links Silicon Valley with Hsinchu Science Park. In London, Eurotrash has passed into the popular diction. In France, a comic strip features Largo Winch—an irritatingly young and good-looking boss with an M.B.A. from Insead. In Japan, one television show is about an American company taking over a Japanese one; the antiheroine is an aggressive, profit-maximizing American, Sara Stanton, who is given to telling the hapless, consensus-loving salarymen that “performance is everything.”

  The cosmocrats are found not only in commerce. There is “sabbatical man,” those high-flying academics who are forever neglecting their students in favor of another semester in Florence. (One joke about a well-known theology professor—let us call him Professor Smith and say he is officially atp. 227tached to Birmingham University—asks what the difference is between Smith and God. The answer: God is everywhere; Smith is everywhere except Birmingham.) There is agency man: the international bureaucrats who cluster together in Washington and Geneva in order to alleviate the woes of the inhabitants of Lagos and Nairobi. There is even Carville man, the traveling circus of political operatives who bring their spin doctoring to elections the world over.

  Lest you pigeonhole them too easily, the assorted cosmocrats are forever trying on each others’ clothes. Company man abandons ship to become an entrepreneur. Sabbatical man supplements his salary by consulting, writing, or forming a hedge fund. Agency man forsakes a job at the World Bank for the emerging-markets division of Goldman Sachs.

  Not all cosmocrats are Westerners. McKinsey, the Vatican of the cosmocracy, is now run by an Indian. So is Ispat, the most global company in the steel industry. When consumer-electronics firms want to test high-tech gadgets, they ignore America’s digital citizens and try their peers in Hong Kong, who have adopted the world’s first widely used interactive television service, the first cybercash cards, and the first mobile-phone network that works in a subway. Many of Ikea’s busiest shops are in eastern Europe, where the nouveaux riches line up to buy the same allegedly “easy to assemble” furniture that frustrates young couples the world over. Half the teachers at the London Business School do not have English as their mother tongue. Flick through the magazine of the Stanford Business School, and you not only discover a rainbow coalition (more than half the students are either from minorities or from abroad) but also plenty of evidence of the gospel spreading around the world. “More than 30 years ago, American warriors came to Vietnam and found it a quagmire,” writes one Vietnamese-American graduate who has been working in his homeland for Procter & Gamble. “In the 1990s, a different type of American warrior, the corporate warrior, came to Vietnam.”[4]

  Even if the people concerned are not Western, their values usually are. In some places, cosmocrat icons have become bywords for Americanness. Marc Lassus, the boss of Gemplus, a French smart-card company, insists that even temporary employees must be able to speak English and derides things he does not like as being “Too Frenchie.”[5] The autobiography of Stan Shih, the similarly evangelical boss of Taiwan’s Acer, has the decidedly un-Confucian title Me-Too Is
Not My Style. In Argentina, Juan Navarro, a former Citibanker who introduced buyouts to the country, has been compared rudely to Gordon Gekko, and Alejandro and Eduardo Elsztain, who have become Argentina’s largest farmers, are usually bracketed with George Soros.

  p. 228 In fact, cosmocrat values are only American to the extent that they are the values of men and women on the move and on the make rather than of a society comfortable with its traditions. They are the sort of people who embrace both Jack Welch’s definition of the “universal values” that he thinks define General Electric (meritocracy, dignity, simplicity, speed, a hatred of bureaucracy) and his intolerance for “any pompous horse’s ass” who does not share them. Cosmocrats are forever eliminating barriers, overcoming limits, removing “rigidities.” “I go to Davos and can talk to Newt Gingrich,” Richard Yan, a bumptious young Shanghai entrepreneur who was one of the first mainland Chinese to go to Harvard Business School, told Time in April 1998. “I call him Newt. And I realize we are all the same: the trousers go on one leg at a time. Most people in China don’t realize that.”[6]

  This attitude to life—whether admirable or arrogant—is built into the way the cosmocrats make their living. Older elites owed their position in life to property, which inevitably bound them to particular places; the cosmocrats, by contrast, owe their positions to information and expertise, which flows easily across borders. Their loyalties—if such a feudal term can be applied to such a quintessentially modern crowd—are international rather than local and calculating rather than emotional: They are far more concerned with the smooth operation of the system as a whole than with the health of any particular part of it.

  William Whyte pointed out that organization man used the word brilliant only when it preceded the word but (“We are all for brilliance, but . . .”) or when it was “coupled with such words as erratic, eccentric, introvert and screwball.” The cosmocrats, on the other hand, value intelligence far more than loyalty. This meritocratic approach means that many cosmocrats are no great respecters of age, race, or gender. Indeed, they may be the first elite in which women play a nearly equal role with men. American women own one third of the country’s businesses. Even in fusty old Europe, the omens are good. In 1996, for the first time, more women entered German universities than men.

  Common “global” aspirations have led to common global habits. E. Digby Baltzell, the man who invented the term WASP, once noted that, at some point between the two world wars, privileged Americans began wearing college ties and hatbands in order to advertise their membership in a national, as opposed to a merely local, elite. Most cosmocrats would not be so crude as to wear business-school ties, but they have developed more subtle ways to signal their membership in the global elite.

  A worrying number of cosmocrats dress alike. A consultant in Bangkok p. 229 doesn’t look any different from her peer in São Paulo; an advertising director trying to secure a table at the Ivy in London wears no less Armani than his counterpart outside the Ivy in Los Angeles; many technologists share the same somewhat minimal hygiene the world over. The cosmocrats’ common fetish for overworking means that exercise is popular: Cosmocrats can often be spotted working out at midnight in the gyms of international hotels or jogging through the early-morning mist of this or that major city. Books on tape—sadly, of the Seven Ways to Mental Health and Financial Success variety—are popular. For all their access to expense accounts, they tend to ignore alcohol with meals. Worst of all, they have an unhealthy weakness not just for Harvard Business Review English but also for global conferences. For a cosmocrat, an invitation to spend a weekend in Ankara discussing supply-chain management is not necessarily a burden to be avoided.

  Two things in particular are proving endemic. The first is an emphasis on cosmopolitan consumerism. Set beside their 1980s ancestor, the yuppie, cosmocrats usually seem relatively restrained and often a little scruffy: The Gap usually matters more than Gucci. But they do want choice. Few things annoy them more than a “buy local” campaign—unless, of course, they are visiting Shanghai Tang’s in Hong Kong. Cosmocrats believe in buying the best on the market, regardless of national origins, and, thanks to globalization, they are increasingly able to indulge this dream.

  Fresh sea bass from Chile is now old hat for Manhattan cosmocrats; the fish displays in restaurants groan with loups de mer from the Mediterranean, hamachi from New Zealand, and various other clunky-looking specimens that have been plucked out of the depths that once used to be Jacques Cousteau’s preserve and flown to Kennedy Airport. At Matsuhisha, a Los Angeles restaurant, one signature dish, anticucho, includes salmon from Alaska, spices from Peru, sake and bamboo leaf from Japan, and chives from California. Magazines such as Wallpaper, Condé Nast Traveler, and Cigar Aficionado all act as informal cosmocrat search engines, scouring the world to explain where the best cushions, holidays, and smokes can be found.

  The second thing is their desire to stay in touch. Cosmocrats have friends not just in high places but in faraway places—hence their almost pathological need to remain in touch through voice mail, e-mail, and relentless travel. It is not enough for cosmocrats to keep mobile phones with them at all times; they equip themselves with tri-bands, which can be used in both Europe and America, or even with satellite phones, which can be used anywhere in the world. When Rupert Murdoch’s then wife, Anna, forced him to take up sailing in a desperate attempt to stop him from working all the time, the tycoon p. 230 secretly loaded the yacht with high-tech communication gear.[7] For lesser figures, networking has a passionate, even demented side. One member of the class talks about marriage as a way of doubling your Rolodex; another, resorting to the language of the Palm Pilot (the cosmocratic gadget par excellence), refers to it as the “ultimate hotsynch.”

  Meanwhile, sometimes their inability to understand life beyond their Rolodexes leads to embarrassing mistakes. John Browning, a London-based consultant and writer, tells the story of gradually getting to know Frances D’Souza, an international campaigner for freedom of expression, at various conferences and forums around the world. Eventually, they traded numbers and addresses. They discovered that they lived next door to each other in London.

  A Different Sort of Elite

  Counting cosmocrats is something of a mug’s game in which the available statistics offer only vague clues: CNN International is delivered to 140 million homes and CNBC to 100 million; on the other hand, only around ten million Europeans, five million Americans, and one million Southeast Asians take an international air flight each year; the combined circulation of Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, the Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist is under 20 million.

  Trying to analyze the elite by nation is not easy. In the United States, around 1.5 million people report income of more than two hundred thousand dollars. Although that figure certainly includes a fair number of Texan car dealers who have never even owned a passport, it surely misses many more young cosmocrats. Wired’s survey of digital citizenry in 1997 found that “connected” Americans (who used e-mail three times a week) accounted for 8.5 percent of the total population (about twenty-three million people). Outside the Anglo-Saxon world, estimations get bogged down by debates about language and culture. Many Europeans—particularly those from small countries—are multinational by nature. And once you hit emerging markets, the guesswork becomes even more hazardous. Huntington, for instance, calculates that, outside the West, fewer than fifty million people shared the sort of cosmopolitan culture he associates with Davos man.[8]

  Mix these various statistics, add in a few similar findings, and we will stick to our estimate that there are around twenty million cosmocrats, of whom around 40 percent live in the United States. And, guessing a little more boldly, we estimate that that figure should double by 2010. Even if the true p. 231 figure is barely half that size, it certainly represents a much broader elite than any previous one. But it remains a very small proportion of the world’s six billion people.
Most people still live in the villages where they were born rather than in pressurized cabins hurtling across the skies between one great city and another. Only about 1.5 percent of the world’s labor force worked outside their home country in 1993, and half of them were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, which import workers for reasons that have more to do with feudalism than globalization. Even in the European Union, with its much-vaunted free movement of labor, only 2 percent of its nationals worked in another member state in the same year.[9] Two thirds of the world’s labor force is still employed in agriculture. Half the world’s population has never made a single phone call, let alone trolled through dozens of voice mails a day.

  This gulf between the cosmocrats and the rest of the world is one reason why the localcrats’ lives are often cushier. All the same, there is no question which class has momentum on its side: Visit any prominent localcrat fiefdom, and you will find a gaggle of sons eager to discuss their time at Stanford or Wharton. Richard Li, one of Li Ka-shing’s sons and now a force in his own right in the Internet business in Asia, started his business training in time-honored fashion, listening to his father discuss his deals and strategies at dinner every night; but when he was thirteen, he was carted off to high school in Menlo Park, California (where he earned spending money working at McDonald’s and caddying at the local golf club), before studying computer science at Stanford and then working in a Western investment bank.