Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna (PDF)

Description

From the visionary bestselling author of The Second World and How to Run the World comes a bracing and authoritative guide to a future shaped less by national borders than by global supply chains, a world in which the most connected powers—and people—will win.Connectivity is the most revolutionary force of the twenty-first century. Mankind is reengineering the planet, investing up to ten trillion dollars per year in transportation, energy, and communications infrastructure linking the world’s burgeoning megacities together. This has profound consequences for geopolitics, economics, demographics, the environment, and social identity. Connectivity, not geography, is our destiny. In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle and the South China Sea to explain the rapid and unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets—a race China is now winning, having launched a wave of infrastructure investments to unite Eurasia around its new Silk Roads. The United States can only regain ground by fusing with its neighbors into a super-continental North American Union of shared resources and prosperity. Connectography offers a unique and hopeful vision for the future. Khanna argues that new energy discoveries and technologies have eliminated the need for resource wars; ambitious transport corridors and power grids are unscrambling Africa’s fraught colonial borders; even the Arab world is evolving a more peaceful map as it builds resource and trade routes across its war-torn landscape. At the same time, thriving hubs such as Singapore and Dubai are injecting dynamism into young and heavily populated regions, cyber-communities empower commerce across vast distances, and the world’s ballooning financial assets are being wisely invested into building an inclusive global society. Beneath the chaos of a world that appears to be falling apart is a new foundation of connectivity pulling it together.Praise for Connectography“Incredible . . . With the world rapidly changing and urbanizing, [Khanna’s] proposals might be the best way to confront a radically different future.”—The Washington Post“Clear and coherent . . . a well-researched account of how companies are weaving ever more complicated supply chains that pull the world together even as they squeeze out inefficiencies. . . . [He] has succeeded in demonstrating that the forces of globalization are winning.”—Adrian Woolridge, The Wall Street Journal “Bold . . . With an eye for vivid details, Khanna has . . . produced an engaging geopolitical travelogue.”—Foreign Affairs“For those who fear that the world is becoming too inward-looking, Connectography is a refreshing, optimistic vision.”—The Economist“Connectivity has become a basic human right, and gives everyone on the planet the opportunity to provide for their family and contribute to our shared future. Connectography charts the future of this connected world.”—Marc Andreessen, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz“Khanna’s scholarship and foresight are world-class. A must-read for the next president.”—Chuck Hagel, former U.S. secretary of defense

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “This book is bad news for President Trump’s chief advisor, SteveBannon, and his colleagues at Breitbart Media. Author Parag Khanna’smeticulous mapping of our planet’s human-designed infrastructure cannotbe deconstructed, and neither can its administrative apparatus of global agreements and deal making—short of a nuclear holocaust….. InConnectography, Khanna traces his own extensive travels around thisplanet, basing his thesis that humanity’s global connectiveinfrastructure now requires a new approach and a field of study beyondtraditional geopolitics and geo-economics….. Khanna’s Connectographyis stunningly buttressed by 18 fascinating cartograms mapping this newworld…. I found Connectography invaluable and compelling reading. Itreminded me of Jane Jacobs’ granular descriptions in her The Death andLife of Great American Cities (1961) and The Economy of Cities (1969).This book will dispel any ideas of closing borders, building walls toexclude immigrants or pursuing old goals of military superiority andspheres of geopolitical influence.” — Hazel Henderson, Seeking Alpha About the Author Parag Khanna is a global strategist, world traveler, and bestselling author. He is a CNN Global Contributor and a Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Khanna is the co-author of Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization and author of How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance and The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. He has been a fellow at the New America Foundation and Brookings Institution, advised the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and worked in Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior geopolitical adviser to U.S. Special Operations Forces. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He serves on numerous governmental and corporate advisory boards and is a councilor of the American Geographical Society, a trustee of the New Cities Foundation, and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1 From Borders to Bridges A Journey Around the World Let’s take a journey around the world—­without ever getting on a plane. If we get an early start in Edinburgh, Scotland, we’ll arrive at London Euston station around noon, stroll quickly past the British Library, and have a quick lunch at the masterfully renovated Victorian-­era St. Pancras station, from which we’ll board the Eurostar train, travel under the Dover Strait to Paris, followed by a high-­speed TGV to Munich and a German ICE to Budapest. An overnight train along the Danube River brings us to Bucharest, Romania, and another overnight along the Black Sea to Istanbul. Where once a creaky ferry was the fastest way to cross from Europe to Asia across the Bosporus Strait, today we can glide over one or the other suspension bridge or continue by train through the newly opened Marmaray tunnel and onward to Iran. We could also catch the revived Hejaz Railway through southeastern Turkey, stopping in Damascus and Amman before continuing to Medina or across Israel and the Sinai to Cairo, from which we might ultimately descend through Africa all the way to Cape Town on a sturdy upgrade of the “Red Line” British colonialists began in the late nineteenth century. From Tehran, we’ll head eastward on a new Chinese-­built railway through the rugged Asian steppe, cross Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan’s commercial hub of Almaty. Several times per week, we can cross into China’s largest province of Xinjiang to its capital, Urumqi, and onward via Xi’an to Beijing. Back in Paris, we might have opted for an overnight sleeper to Moscow, from which we could catch the fabled Trans-­Siberian Railway to Vladivostok—­and carry on to Pyongyang and Seoul—­or branch off a bit earlier toward Beijing, via either Manchuria or Mongolia. Either way, if we opt for the tropical route, we’ll speed southward along the world’s most extensive high-­speed rail network into mountainous Yunnan and its capital, Kunming. From there, we can cross directly into Laos and take in Vientiane before crossing into Thailand toward Bangkok, or take a coastal route along the South China Sea via Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and through Phnom Penh in Cambodia to Bangkok. Now the options narrow with the geography: we speed on down the Malay Peninsula to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, the southernmost point on mainland Asia. But water hasn’t stopped us so far, so let’s continue by train through a tunnel under the strategic Strait of Malacca onto Indonesia’s largest island of Sumatra, then over the Sunda Strait bridge to reach the capital, Jakarta, on Java, the world’s most populous island with more than 150 million people. Just a bit farther and we’re on the beaches of Bali, from which we can catch a cruise ship to Australia. If we choose the fastest routes and don’t miss any connections, we will have traversed the entire Eurasian landmass—­Scotland to Singapore, and then some—­in about a week. And yet we’re only halfway done. Instead of the Antipodes, from Beijing we should actually head north through Vladivostok and eastern Siberia. If you fancy sushi, we could take a bridge to Sakhalin Island and pass through a 45-­kilometer tunnel to Japan’s northernmost Hokkaido Island, passing seamlessly southward across Japan’s major islands on high-­speed Shinkansen trains. When we reach Kyushu, we’ll loop back through a 120-­kilometer undersea tunnel to Busan, zipping northward through the Korean peninsula back toward Siberia to continue our next 13,000-­kilometer segment that takes us parallel to the volcanic Kamchatka Peninsula and through a 200-­kilometer tunnel under the Bering Strait that emerges in Alaska and takes us to Fairbanks. From there, of course, it’s straight south to Juneau and Vancouver, Seattle and Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. California, Texas, Illinois, and New York all want more Acela Express high-­speed rail (though it’s planned to hit only about two hundred kilometers per hour, about half as fast as the Japanese). Still, we’ll make it from Pacific to Atlantic across the Lower 48 in two days. All that’s left is to catch a zippy but smooth hovercraft to London, followed by any of the more than twenty daily trains headed to Edinburgh. A journey around the world—­as promised. One could fly almost seamlessly along this itinerary, drive much of it too except for the oceans, and indeed eventually do it the old-­fashioned way on iron railroads. Many of these routes already exist, and all of them will in due course. The more connections there are, the more options we have. “Geography is destiny,” one of the most famous adages about the world, is becoming obsolete. Centuries-­old arguments about how climate and culture condemn some societies to fail, or how small countries are forever trapped and subject to the whims of larger ones, are being overturned. Thanks to global transportation, communications, and energy infrastructures—­highways, railways, airports, pipelines, electricity grids, Internet cables, and more—­the future has a new maxim: “Connectivity is destiny.” Seeing the world through the lens of connectivity generates new visions of how we organize ourselves as a species. Global infrastructures are morphing our world system from divisions to connections and from nations to nodes. Infrastructure is like a nervous system connecting all parts of the planetary body; capital and code are the blood cells flowing through it. More connectivity creates a world beyond states, a global society greater than the sum of its parts. Much as the world evolved from vertically integrated empires to horizontally interdependent states, now it is graduating toward a global network civilization whose map of connective corridors will supersede traditional maps of national borders. Each continental zone is already becoming an internally integrated mega-­region (North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Arabia, South Asia, East Asia) with increasingly free trade coupled with intense connectivity across their thriving city-­states. At the same time, maps of connectivity are also better at revealing geopolitical dynamics among superpowers, city-­states, stateless companies, and virtual communities of all kinds as they compete to capture resources, markets, and mind share. We are moving into an era where cities will matter more than states and supply chains will be a more important source of power than militaries—­whose main purpose will be to protect supply chains rather than borders. Competitive connectivity is the arms race of the twenty-­first century. Connectivity is nothing less than our path to collective salvation. Competition over connectivity is by its nature less violent than international border conflicts, providing an escape hatch from historical cycles of great power conflict. Furthermore, connectivity has made previously unimaginable progress possible as resources and technologies move much more easily to where they are needed, while people can more quickly relocate to escape natural disasters or to cities for economic opportunity. Better connectivity allows societies to diversify where their imports come from and where their exports go. Connectivity is therefore how we make the most of our geography. The grand story of human civilization is more than just tragic cycles of war and peace or economic booms and busts. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward connectivity. Bridges to Everywhere The central fact of the age we live in is that every country, every market, every medium of communication, every natural resource is connected. —­ Simon Anholt, The Good Country Party Connectivity is the new meta-­pattern of our age. Like liberty or capitalism, it is a world-­historical idea, one that gestates, spreads, and transforms over a long timescale and brings about epochal changes. Despite the acute unpredictability that afflicts our world today, we can be adequately certain of current mega-­trends such as rapid urbanization and ubiquitous technology. Every day, for the first time in their lives, millions of people switch on mobile phones, log on to the Web, move into cities, or fly on an airplane. We go where opportunity and technology allow. Connectivity is thus more than a tool; it is an impulse. No matter which way we connect, we do so through infrastructure. While the word “infrastructure” is less than a century old, it represents nothing less than our physical capacity for global interaction. Engineering advances have made new infrastructures possible that were the dreams of previous generations. Over a century ago, crucial geographic interventions such as the Suez and Panama Canals reshaped global navigation and trade. Since the nineteenth century, Ottoman sultans aspired to construct a tunnel that would connect Istanbul’s European and Asian sides. Now Turkey has both the Marmaray tunnel that opened in 2013 and freight railways and oil and gas pipelines that are strengthening its position as a key corridor between Europe and China. Turkey has been called the country where continents collide; now it is the country where continents connect. The early twentieth-­century Japanese emperor Taisho also sought to link Honshu and northern Hokkaido Island, but only in the 1980s did it complete the Seikan Tunnel, which traverses fifty-­four kilometers (including twenty-­three kilometers under the seabed) and carries Shinkansen high-­speed trains. Once the tunnels to Sakhalin and South Korea are complete, Japan won’t truly be an island anymore. We are in only an early phase of reengineering the planet to facilitate surging flows of people, commodities, goods, data, and capital. Indeed, the next wave of transcontinental and intercontinental mega-­infrastructures is even more ambitious: an interoceanic highway across the Amazon from São Paulo to Peru’s Pacific port of San Juan de Marcona, bridges connecting Arabia to Africa, a tunnel from Siberia to Alaska, polar submarine cables on the Arctic seabed from London to Tokyo, and electricity grids transferring Saharan solar power under the Mediterranean to Europe. Britain’s exclave of Gibraltar will be the mouth of a tunnel under the Mediterranean to Tangier in Morocco, from which a new high-­speed rail extends down the coast to Casablanca. Even where continents are not physically attaching to each other, ports and airports are expanding to absorb the massive increase in cross-­continental flows. None of these mega-­infrastructures are “bridges to nowhere.” Those that already exist have added trillions of dollars of value to the world economy. During the Industrial Revolution, it was the combination of higher productivity and trade that raised Britain’s and America’s growth rates to 1–­2 percent for more than a century. As the Nobel laureate Michael Spence has argued, the internal growth of economies would never have reached today’s rates without the cross-­border flows of resources, capital, and technology. Because only one-­quarter of world trade is between countries that share a border, connectivity is the sine qua non for growth both within countries and across them. Connectivity itself—­alongside demographics, capital markets, labor productivity, and ­technology—­is thus a major source of momentum in the global economy. Think of the world like a watch whose battery is constantly charged through kinetic energy: The more you walk, the more power it has. For all the effort we expend calculating the value of national economies, therefore, it is time to devote as much attention to the value of connectivity between them. There is no better investment than connectivity. Government spending on physical infrastructure—­what is known as gross fixed capital formation—­such as roads and bridges, and social infrastructure, such as medical care and education, is considered investment (rather than consumption) because it saves costs in the long run and generates widespread benefits for society. Large-­scale spending on infrastructure was relatively low for most of the nineteenth century, accounting for about 5–­7 percent of England’s GDP and peaking at 10 percent on the eve of World War I.1 The United States ramped up its infrastructure investment to almost 20 percent of GDP from the late nineteenth century through World War I, enabling it to double Britain’s growth rate and become the world’s largest economy. Even though the major American and Canadian canal and railroad companies went bankrupt at the turn of the twentieth century, they left the country with an extensive transportation network that enabled continental-­scale commercial expansion right up to the present. The influential British economist John Maynard Keynes strongly argued for such public works investment as a tool of creating jobs and boosting aggregate demand, policies adopted by President Roosevelt during the Depression. From World War II onward, fixed capital formation rose like a west-­to-­east wave from under 20 percent of GDP to over 30 percent. Germany’s 1950s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), Japan’s 1960s 9 percent growth rates, the “Asian Tigers” of the 1970s and 1980s (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong), and then China starting in the 1990s, where it topped 40 percent of GDP and powered sustained growth of close to 10 percent for the past three decades. China embraced Keynes like nobody’s business. The past several decades prove beyond any doubt that connectivity is how regions move from economies valued in the billions to the trillions. Furthermore, infrastructure is a foundation of social mobility and economic resilience: Urban societies with ample transportation networks (such as southern China) rebounded much faster from the 2007–­8 financial crisis, with people able to move efficiently to find work. Spain was among the hardest hit by the eurozone recession but thanks to its high-­quality infrastructure is today Europe’s fastest-­growing economy. As global debt surges to record levels while interest rates remain at historical lows, the world’s finances should be directed toward underwriting productive connectivity rather than ethereal derivatives. For a massive country such as America to live up to its self-­proclaimed destiny, it too must spend much more on connectivity. Historically, U.S. infrastructure spending has returned almost $2 for every $1 invested, but investment has been tailing off for decades. Today America’s clogged roads and tunnels cause wasteful congestion, its crumbling bridges cause accidents and delays, and its ailing ports and refineries lack both the efficiency and the capacity to meet global demand. Since the financial crisis, dozens of prominent economists including Yale’s Robert Shiller have advocated infrastructure-­led investment as a way to create jobs and boost economic confidence. The American Society of Civil Engineers has called for $1.6 trillion in spending for an overhaul of America’s transportation system. Only now—­and just before it is too late—­is such a national overhaul near the top of America’s agenda with proposals for the creation of a national infrastructure bank. The same is true across the world: The gap between the supply and the demand for infrastructure has never been greater. As the world population climbs toward eight billion people, it has been living off the infrastructure stock meant for a world of three billion. But only infrastructure and all the industries that benefit from it can collectively create the estimated 300 million jobs needed in the coming two decades as populations grow and urbanize. The World Bank argues that infrastructure is the “missing link” in achieving the Milennium Development Goals related to poverty, health, education, and other objectives, and infrastructure has been formally included in the latest Sustainable Development Goals ratified in 2015.3 The transition beyond export-­led growth toward higher value-­added services and consumption begins with infrastructure investment.We are finally witnessing a massive global commitment to infrastructure. Cities and highways, pipelines and ports, bridges and tunnels, telecom towers and Internet cables, electricity grids and sewage systems, and other fixed assets command about $3 trillion per year in global spending, well over the $1.75 trillion spent annually on defense, and the gap is growing. Infrastructure outlays are projected to rise to $9 trillion per year by 2025 (with Asia leading the way). The global connectivity revolution has begun. Already we have installed a far greater volume of lines connecting people than dividing them: Our infrastructural matrix today includes approximately 64 million kilometers of highways, 2 million kilometers of pipelines, 1.2 million kilometers of railways, and 750,000 kilometers of undersea Internet cables that connect our many key population and economic centers. By contrast, we have only 250,000 kilometers of international borders. By some estimates, mankind will build more infrastructures in the next forty years alone than it has in the past four thousand. The interstate puzzle thus gives way to a lattice of infrastructure circuitry. The world is starting to look a lot like the Internet. Seeing Is Believing Astronauts in low Earth orbit (about 215 kilometers high) have snapped stunning pictures of our majestic planet. They’ve captured natural features like oceans, mountains, ice caps, and glaciers, and even caught glimpses of man-­made structures. It turns out that the Great Wall of China and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt are rather difficult to discern without high-­performance zoom lenses, but more modern engineering such as megacities, ultra-­long bridges, and straight desert highways are easy to spot. The Kennecott copper mine in Utah and the Mir diamond mine in Siberia stretch several kilometers across, making their stepped terrace structure noticeable as well. The two hundred square kilometers of greenhouses in Al­mería in southern Spain, where up to half of Europe’s annual demand for fresh fruits and vegetables is grown, is unmistakable, especially as sunlight reflects off their plastic roofs. What about borders? How many of those are physically robust enough to see? Many political borders are formed by natural environmental features, reminding us of nature’s fundamental role in shaping human settlement and cultural differentiation. The border between North and South Korea is best seen when the sun goes down, when the bright lights of the South contrast with the darkness of the North. The most visible border between any two large countries is undoubtedly between India and Pakistan. Stretching diagonally for twenty-­nine hundred kilometers from the Arabian Sea to Kashmir, it also stands out from space at night due to the 150,000 floodlights that form a bright orange blaze. The maps hanging in our classrooms and offices would lead us to believe that all borders were as robust as the Indo-­Pakistani border. Yet North America’s two major borders mask the deeper reality of growing connectivity. The three-­thousand-­kilometer U.S.-­Mexico border crosses beaches and deserts and along the Rio Grande River but also between cities that have the same name on either side such as Nogales, Naco, and Tecate. Even with haphazardly patrolled security fencing on the American side, it is still the most frequently traversed border in the world, with over 350 million legal crossings annually (more than the entire population of the United States). The U.S.-­Canada border that stretches from the Arctic to the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean is the world’s longest at almost nine thousand kilometers, but 300,000 people and over $1 billion in daily trade traverse the almost twenty major border crossings. There are many places where borders are stiffening: Israel’s security barrier, the fifteen-­kilometer Évros River fence in Greece, and the two-­hundred-­kilometer Bulgarian barbed-­wire fence aimed at curbing illegal immigrants, among others. And yet all of these borders—­and even more unfriendly ones—­remain porous. And indeed, almost all such fences are terribly costly and ineffective responses to problems that borders cannot solve. If borders are meant to separate territories and societies, then why are ever more populations clustering along them? It is a particular irony that our maps show mostly political borders rather than border demographics and economics, which are the embodiment of the anti-­border nature of many border regions. Most of Canada’s population lives near the U.S. border and benefits from proximity to the American market. Since 2010, both the Mexican and the U.S. populations on their border have grown by 20 percent. Even more ironic: The best place to see how connectivity fundamentally changes relations from hostility to cooperation is borders. The thriving business between India and Pakistan and many other pairs of antagonists is a reminder that borders are rarely the solid lines we see on maps but rather porous filters for exchange. In these and dozens of other cases, we increasingly work around our borders—­and build straight across them—­more than we bow to them. Ultimately, from the Great Wall of China and Hadrian’s Wall to the Berlin Wall—­and eventually the Cypriot Green Line and the Korean demilitarized zone—­forces far more powerful than these barriers prevail. As Alexandra Novosseloff has written, “A wall ends its life as a tourist attraction.” In today’s world, territorial boundaries don’t even really capture the geography of borders: Airports may be far inland but contain borders within them, while cyber-­security forces patrol technology infrastructures that stretch far across borders. Even if political ­borders remain physically robust, the world has still become more borderless as countries eliminate extraneous visa requirements, ­currencies are exchangeable in real time at ATMs, content from almost anywhere can be accessed online, and the cost of phone calls drops to zero due to Skype and Viber. The more societies trade and communicate—­and depend on each other for food, water, and energy—­the less we can pretend that borders are the most important lines on the map. The absence of the full panoply of man-­made infrastructure on our maps gives the impression that borders trump other means of portraying human geography. But today the reverse is true: Borders matter only where they matter; other lines matter more most of the time. Hardly anywhere are they a more significant factor in the fate of nations than what crosses them. We are building a new world order—­literally. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Many of us who came of age in the late 20th Century see the world reaching a pivot point. The old 20th Century world of nation-states organized in camps of “Free World, Socialist, and Third World Non-aligned” now seems a quaint and archaic relic of a bygone era.But what will replace it? It the 1990’s and early 2000’s the vision of a globalized world based on free trade prosperity took root in the USA, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Standards of living in every country were supposed to soar when barriers to free trade between nations were removed. Then the free trade agreements were signed, and the global economy promptly collapsed into the Great Recession. Growth rates in most countries have stagnated since then, and living standards may actually be falling in many developed countries.So, what does the future hold? What will the world look like at mid-21st Century? Will the stagnation continue, or will the promised global prosperity finally emerge?Author Parag Khanna argues the case for global prosperity based on the “connectivity” of human migration, communication, and infrastructure:===The road map of this book follows several interconnected thrusts. First, connectivity has replaced division as the new paradigm of global organization. Human society is undergoing a fundamental transformation by which functional infrastructure tells us more about how the world works than political borders.Countries run by supply chains, cities that run themselves, communities that know no borders, and companies with more power than governments— all are evidence of the shift toward a new kind of pluralistic world system.==He envisions a coming world of economically vibrant urban areas that forge trading ties with each other, while the national governments that sit on top of them atrophy by “devolution” of their political authority to the city-states. San Francisco and Beijing might find themselves to be more connected economically than either city finds itself connected with other cities in its own country. After all, San Francisco’s real estate is being scooped up by Chinese investors, but San Francisco has about as much in common with Detroit as the Man in the Moon.===The true map of the world should feature not just states but megacities, highways, railways, pipelines, Internet cables, and other symbols of our emerging global network civilization. Second, devolution is the most powerful political force of our age: Everywhere empires are splintering and authority is dissipating away from central capitals toward provinces and cities that seek autonomy in their financial and diplomatic affairs.==But how far will that trend be allowed to continue? After all, it is NATIONAL governments that raise the taxes and issue the debt that pays for mega projects like globe-girdling bullet trains, continent-wide water management, airports, traditional highways, and internet connections. In fact, the debt generated by spending on infrastructure is a NATION-BUILDING event. George Washington got the ball rolling on America’s Constitutional Convention by calling upon the states of Virginia and Maryland to join together in building a Potomac Canal to link the Eastern Seaboard with the Ohio Valley Country. Canada exists because Britain’s North American colonies bankrupted themselves trying to build a transcontinental railroad as independent entities. So it would seem that infrastructure is more the friend of consolidation of national authority than of its devolution.Khanna speaks of the role of supply chains in connecting the world:==Supply chains and connectivity, not sovereignty and borders, are the organizing principles of humanity in the 21st century.==In reality, the governments of many countries rigorously control the supply chains coming into their countries in order to protect their domestic manufacturing.There is growing skepticism, especially in the USA, that free trade with these countries is mutually beneficial. The more the tariffs have been reduced, the more these countries have exported to the USA, without buying commensurate value of our products. The USA ran trade surpluses with Mexico until NAFTA was signed. The very next year the surplus turned into a soaring deficit as thousands of U.S. companies closed their USA factories and moved production to low-wage Mexico.Trade with Asia has also fallen far short of the promise that it would “turn the USA into an export powerhouse, thereby creating millions of high-wage jobs for American workers.” The reality is that the USA imports more than four times as much from China as we export to them, and import more than twice as much from Japan as we export. U.S. exports to South Korea actually DECLINED after the USA / South Korea free trade was signed, while imports from South Korea soared.It seems that free trade with low-wage countries not only discourages them from producing in the USA, but also encourages American companies to relocate THEIR production out of the USA. If a certain candidate is elected President of the USA in a few months, the “global supply chain” may take a beating.Another passage links the building of global infrastructure to political devolution of power from nation states to local governments:===We are in only an early phase of re-engineering the planet to facilitate surging flows of people, commodities, goods, data, and capital.===But has the devolution away from central governments (occurring mainly in ancient European Kingdoms like Britain and Spain) really been spawned by desire to “facilitate surging flows of people?” Or, has it been instigated by desire to protect the ethnicity and economic prospects of small, localized homogeneous populations from excessive foreign immigration coming across the open borders of large multi-ethnic nations?Thus, as appealing as Khanna’s vision of a mid-century prosperity network among international mega-cities is, it is also possible that we may be seeing a backlash return to the nation-state model of commerce — including customs posts, tariffs, capital controls, and intensive national regulation of multinational business. Perhaps we will not know until a few more decades have passed whether the reality will live up to the optimistic vision that Khanna lays out here.

⭐I’m not sure if Khanna’s latest book is a futurology tome, a besieging number of examples for the emergence of the supply chain as the organizing principle of civilization, or the most readable macro-economics text I’ve seen. His arguments are cogent and convincing. If I had to summarize – human interaction, connectedness, and the marketplace will rule the future, enabled by digital technology and the pressing needs of the marketplace. Most of the vices of the political and religious world and the murderous nature of man will be ironed out by interdependence, less reliance on nations and more on financial, service, and manufacturing networks, and the global specialization of labor. He makes the liberal argument compellingly that the single largest reason to do a trade deal is to suppress war and support stability, and the more trade deals, even bad ones, the better. This is a long range view that the 2016 USA presidential race has conveniently forgotten.Parag doesn’t sugar-coat it – the dross that humanity drags with it that truly threatens mankind will take concerted effort to overcome: crisis venues like global warming, ethnic cleansing, rising sea levels, rapidly mutating diseases and epidemics, the interplay of population growth with straitened resources. He also points out over and over that investment in infrastructure is the single greatest payout a city, industrial sector, region, or nation can make. The losers will be the ones who make this investment their goal too late, or who outsource it (like Mongolia has to China) to others without getting a proper ownership stake. He also points out that bad things, like human trafficking, illegally supporting failed or dictatorial states, drug running, and terrorism are also facilitated by interconnectedness.One area that this convincing book (how many times will I mention that it is convincing?) did not address to my satisfaction is the pinch on the nation states. To stay connected in the midst of globalization, they have increasing pressures on their regulatory environment, on their sovereignty, on their tax rates, on their political devolution to ethnic groups and to the cities. At the same time, he calls upon nations to save the hinterlands, promote infrastructure, presumably maintain military organizations (if nothing else than as shock troops for epidemic response), educate the masses, and most importantly save large disenfranchised classes even as national tax bases fritter away to other political / economic states. It’s nice to have the problems pointed out but more difficult to understand next steps. Revolutions show us that the big transitions are the zones of most trauma and human loss.Khanna has the credentials (look him up) to write a book that shows how the networks and their friction and flow will triumph over borders and parochial political forces in the long term, and I think he’s got it right. It’s a message that is simple in an incredibly complex world – like Adam Smith’s unseen hand of the market, Khanna’s Connectography implies that the linkup is the thing, and that interconnection is so rewarding to every player for every reason measurable that it becomes an unstoppable force. Like Smith’s unseen hand, its sheer distributed nature means it will defeat hierarchic organized efforts to stem it.Scott Jones

⭐Connectography may well emerge as the most important book since 9/11. It brushes through terror, Islam, the rise of China, the banking collapse and the crises of the news cycle headlines to illustrate the world as it actually is and not as seen by the vested interests of nation states. “We are moving into an era where cities will matter more than states and supply chains will be a more important source of power than militaries,” writes Parag Khanna unfolding before us a global picture led by infrastructure building, trade and technology that will drive forward to break down borders and create winners out of those who are the most connected to others. “As the lines that connect us supersede the borders that divide us, functional geography is becoming more important than political geography.” With the rise of China and re-emergence of Russia, Francis Fukuyama has now been proved lacking in his post Cold War prediction that liberal democracy is the end of the social evolution of humanity. Since then, we have all been looking around for something else, away from the nihilistic bloodshed of the Middle East and looming threats of Russia and China. Khanna may have given us one. It is not politics but infrastructure. “Connectivity has become the foundation for global society”, he says. “We should strive toward such a Pax Urbanica.” This is an uplifting and inspirational read, particularly set against the backdrop of the past decade.

⭐I was looking forward to reading this book as it sounded interesting – how wrong I was ! The author’s central thesis – about increasing global connectivity – is valid enough and he is clearly very well travelled and an intellectual. However, this is not an accessible read because of how it is written, both in terms of the language used and the book’s disjointed structure. One feels like a great book could have been written as some small parts of it are actually really interesting (so it merits two stars). It’s all like wading through treacle – one for the imsomniacs out there !

⭐great book

⭐Honestly, I should have listened to the other reviews. The maps are tiny.

⭐Parag is on the button, though I disagree with some of his points and find his wavering theses on Asia to be confusing and a mark of weak philosophy. But he’s one of the most important writers on world affairs, and this book says it all. (Side note: this book says Connectivity is the future; his new book literally says The Future is Asian. Which one is it Parag? Make up your mind! You can’t have it both ways! (Maybe he was recently commissioned by the Communist Party of China)).

Keywords

Free Download Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization in PDF format
Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization PDF Free Download
Download Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization 2016 PDF Free
Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization 2016 PDF Free Download
Download Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization PDF
Free Download Ebook Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization