"Fortune Favors the Bold" is MIT Professor Lester Thurow's latest proposal on how to build a better world order. For Thurow, economic crises are an ever-present reality of increased global trade. He cautions us, however, that in regards to globalization, "those who leap sometimes lose, but those who do not leap always lose." Essentially, Thurow has taken one of his central premises for supporting globalization from the New York State Lottery: "You gotta be in it to win it."

With the 2004 presidential campaign season upon the nation, international trade may prove to be a central concern of the election. Although globalization has been somewhat overshadowed by national security concerns and the war in Iraq, the past three years have seen their share of globalization dust-ups. The struggle over US tariffs against imported steel seems to have strengthened the World Trade Organization as a multilateral dispute resolution body, but a fight over restrictive contracts in Iraq's redevelopment may test the WTO's national security exceptions. In the Western hemisphere, the creation of an ad-hoc, somewhat post-Marxist Latin American alliance between the governments of Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina has complicated efforts to form a Free Trade Area of the Americas this fall in Miami. And even as the economy seems to recover, a loss of approximately 1.9 million manufacturing jobs since 2000 has created fertile ground for demagoguery against Southeast Asia. Welcome to globalization 2004.

While Thurow mentions trade conflicts with Europe and the growing strength of China in the world economy, his focus isn't any of these things. He stays with one of the globalization debate's more traditional narrative: why today's model for trade is ultimately preferable to unilateral trade marred by high tariffs, and why some nations have succeeded at the globalization game with what they have at their disposal.

In one of the book's major sections, Thurow compares the United States, Europe and Japan as global competitors whose citizenry have chosen different institutional safeguards and responses to economic crises, and by doing so have effected their development in the 21st Century. Unable to adopt a functioning bankruptcy system, Japan perpetuates the liquidity trap that mires its economy. Satisfied with high unemployment benefits and other social services, many European countries have kept unemployment high and investment in new industries relatively low. In the United States, business-friendly decisions have kept the unemployment levels low, but often at the expense of many of the working class, who receive lower wages and fewer benefits. This framework covers familiar territory for anyone forced to sit through high school economics — winners and losers, fortunes found and fortunes lost. While this framework serves Thurow's purpose, the general and abstract character of such insights places too much weight on economic analogies, and this is a burden that the book's argument carries awkwardly.

Unfortunately, it seems as though too many books written by both the left and the right about globalization are satisfied with employing cute analogies (in Thurow's case the fortunes of exploring unknown territory) and abstract ideas to describe complex relationships of political economy. Few focus on the people, institutions and conflicts that have made the last 50 years of international trade and development so damn interesting. Many know that John Maynard Keynes, the architect of both the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, spent most of his time with his Bloomsbury Group cohort of artists and writers, but few know that in the 1960s the US government assigned two of the "best and the brightest," red-diaper baby Walt Whitman Rostow and steely-eyed Robert McNamara, to present a vision for international development that would rival the allure of the recent Cuban revolution and all of world Communism. Another tale of intrigue involves monetarist Milton Friedman, who helped train what would be known as the "Chicago Boys," young economists who served as the chief financial planners for Gen. Augusto Pinochet's bloody economic reformation in Chile. The rise to power of the Conservative Party, headed by Margaret Thatcher, in the UK in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 created the context for the deregulation policies of the "Washington Consensus." Among this group was President Fernando Enrique Cardoso of Brazil, a former left-wing dependency theorist turned free market true believer.

Each of the above stories teaches valuable lessons about trade, development and political freedom, but none is mentioned in this book — perhaps because economists like Thurow really can't be bothered with the sticky matter of history. As a result, "Fortune Favors the Bold" feels like a book written on the fly. This isn't that rare, especially when books are written by longtime experts in the field, but it can make for slow, painful reading at times. Economists don't have to be historians, but some history is necessary to give such a complex subject texture and perspective. Perhaps for an established economist like Thurow, it is just easier to write about how some nations are like surfers who should "get ahead of the technological wave so they can catch it and ride their surf boards to economic success." Ride Lester, ride.