Countries Like Neighborhoods

Quoting from the book “The World is Flat” chapter “I Can Only Get It For You Retail”, the author asks the question “What if the world were like the neighborhoods of a city”? What would the world look like?

Western Europe would be an assisted-living facility with an ageing population, lavishly attended by Turkish nurses.

United States would be a gated community, with a metal detector at the front gate and a lot of people sitting in their front yards complaining about how lazy everyone else was, even though out back there was a small opening in the fence for Mexican labor and other energetic immigrants who help make the gated community function.

Latin America would be the fun part of town, the club district, where the workday doesn’t begin until 10:00 P.M. and everyone sleeps till midmorning. It’s definitely the place to hang out, but in between the clubs, you don’t see a lot of new businesses opening, except on the street where the Chileans live. The landlords of this neighborhood almost never reinvest their profits here, but keep them in a bank across town.

The Arab street would be a dark alley where outsiders fear to tread, except for a few side streets called, Dubai, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, and Morocco. The only new business is gas stations, whose owners, like the elite in the Latin neighborhood, rarely invest their funds in the neighborhood. Many people on the Arab street have their curtains closed, their shutters drawn, and signs on their front lawn that say “No Trespassing. Beware of dog.”

India, China and East Asia would be “the other side of the tracks.” Their neighborhood is a big teeming market, made up of small shops and one room factories, interspersed with Stanley Kaplan SAT prep schools, and engineering colleges. Nobody ever sleeps in this neighborhood, everyone lives in extended families, and everyone is working to get to “the right side of the tracks.”

On the Chinese streets there area no rule of law, but the streets are well-paved; there are no potholes, and the street lights all work. On the Indian streets, by contrast, no one ever repairs the streetlights, the roads are full of ruts, but the police are sticklers for rules. You need a license to open a lemonade stand on the Indian street. Luckily, the local cops can be bribed, and the successful entrepreneurs all have their own generators to run their factories and the latest cell phones to get around the fact that the local telephone poles are all down.

Africa, sadly, is that part of town where the businesses are boarded up, life expectancy is declining and the only new buildings are health-care clinics.

The point made is that every region of the world has its own strength and weaknesses, and all are in need of reform retail to some degree. What is reform retail? It’s more than opening up your country to foreign trade and investments and making a few small changes at the top. That is reform wholesale. Reform retail presumes you have already done your reform wholesale. It involves looking at four key aspects of your society--infrastructure, regulatory institutions, education, and culture (the general way your country and its leaders relate to the world) – and upgrading each one to remove as many friction points as possible. The idea of reform retail is to enable the greatest number of your people to have the best legal and institutional framework from which to innovate, start companies, and become attractive partners for those who want to collaborate with them from elsewhere in the world”.

Anyway, if you are interested in the way the world is flattening out and who will fall or is falling over the presipice, the book is highly recommended reading.