How We Got To Globalization Today: A Conversation with Jeffrey Garten

In the period immediately following WWII, the United States dominated the global economy. We had won the war, and the economic status that went along with it. 

Then over time, and initially as a result of our efforts and generosity, other economies began to grow. Japan, West Germany, Canada and Australia would stir, but the world would, in the war's aftermath, acquiesce to an American imposed system of monetary order. One underpinned by gold and the US direction.

But 28 years later the children would grow up. The other economies of the world would come into their full inheritance. So much so that by the time of the Nixon administration, in 1971, it had to accommodate the change.

What happened next, as Nixon and his economic advisers would meet secretly at camp David, in August of 1971, set the stage for the modern era of globalization.

The gold standard would be abandoned, and a new world economic order would be born. I think it’s fair to say that it’s impossible to understand the global economy today without understand this singular moment

Jeffrey Garten, the Dean emeritus of the Yale School of Management, takes us back to this moment in his new work Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy 

My conversation with Jeffrey Garten:

The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives

Today, globalization faces a crisis of its own success. The international movement of goods, money, communications and ideas has been going on since even before the 12th Century. However, today the context of that globalization has changed.

Where once driven individuals could change the world, today the very complexity of the world that globalization has created means that it can no longer exist in an economic vacuum, free from the drag of domestic and geopolitics.

But to fully understand what we might need to do, we have to understand how we got here. That’s the story that Jeffrey Garten tells in his new book From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives.  Garten looks at ten people who have single handedly changed the world during the last 800 years.  It’s a kind of biography of globalization.

My conversation with Jeffrey Garten: