The Great Rewiring
History isn’t a straight line. It’s a volatile cycle of booms, busts, and forced reboots. Here is the operating system for the next decade. History has a way of looking like a straight line when viewed from the rearview mirror. We tend to view globalization as an inevitable, linear march toward a singular, borderless economy. It is a comforting narrative. It suggests that despite the noise, the signal always points toward integration. If you look closer at the data, however, the story changes. The process of binding nations together isn’t a steady climb. It is a volatile cycle of booms and busts, a series of aggressive expansions followed by violent contractions. We are currently living through one of those contractions. To understand where the “Business Rockstars” of the next decade will find their footing, we must understand the mechanics of this machine. We have to look at the three pivotal eras of integration: the initial explosion before World War I, the constrained rebuild after ...