The Global Me: New Cosmopolitans and the Competitive Edge: Picking Globalism's Winners and Losers
By G. Pascal Zachary
PublicAffairs, 336 pp., $26

A relatively recent school of economic thought attributes to ethnically homogeneous nations such as Japan a social harmony and unity of purpose that virtually guarantees them an advantage over more diverse, less disciplined competitors. And in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Japan's economy seemed ready to trounce that of the United States and racial divisions burned out of control in the streets of Los Angeles, many Americans were ready to agree. Nonsense, says author-and TR columnist-G. Pascal Zachary.

The Global Me is a passionate diatribe for "hybridity," Zachary's word for the mixing of racial and ethnic backgrounds within individuals and nations. "Under the right conditions, hybrid societies trump monocultures," he asserts. When conditions aren't right-when governments ignore racial discrimination and inequalities of wealth, or when immigrants are tolerated only as long as they take jobs that no native wants-hybridity can be a net drag. But when corporations go out of their way to hire foreign-born executives, or when children of interracial marriages are encouraged to bring both parents' cultures into their schools and workplaces, the result is greater innovation. One need only look at Silicon Valley-where one-third of the scientists and engineers are immigrants, and Chinese and Indian immigrants alone have founded 2,700 companies employing 58,000 people-to understand the power of hybridity.