Kirkus Reviews
BOLD NEW WORLD
Knoke,
William
BOLD
NEW WORLD
The
Essential Road Map to
the
Twenty-First Century
Kodansha
(368 pp.)
$25.00
Feb.
1996
ISBN:
1-56836-095-9
An investment banker’s sophisticated audit of the geopolitical and
socioeconomic forces that could shape the postmillennial world.
Unlike many for-profit prophets, Knoke resists the temptation to present
facts as forecasts. Instead, he focuses on underestimated developments and
already discernible trends that could determine the course of future events.
Given ongoing advances in the state of the telecommunications/computer
art and continuous improvement in transport, for example, the author argues that
planet Earth has acquired a fourth dimension, one that makes place appreciably
less important than once was the case. Employing
this provocative premise as a starting point, he moves on to assert that
capital, labor, and raw materials will play diminishing roles in the global
economy during the years ahead. In
his view, the same holds true for central banks, depository institutions,
gigantic corporations, and other mainstays of the past, including nation-states.
Among other outcomes, Knoke predicts the emergence of new organizational
forms (e.g., multilocals rather than multinationals) with relatively small
headquarters staffs, as increasing incidents of corporate spin-offs, the
creation of more microstates (in Western Europe as well as in the erstwhile
USSR), the spread of democracy, the redeployment of surplus workers.
The author also sees a host of other eventualities over the horizon.
Cases in point range from the challenges of terrorism, tribal conflict,
and environmental degradation through the possibility that the WTO represents a
first step toward world government, the likelihood the Global Village’s
children will become a database (thanks to the Internet), and the possibility
that Islamic fundamentalists may face the same fate as the Bolsheviks.
Perceptive perspectives on what tomorrow might hold for the family of man
and its commercial enterprises. (Book-of-the
Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections; $100,000 ad/promo; author
tour)
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