Kellogg’s Owen L. Coon Forum was packed on Thursday night as undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and alumni congregated to listen to Sylvia Nasar, the author of the award-winning novel A Beautiful Mind.
Nasar, whose book inspired the movie by the same name starring Russell Crowe, was the latest distinguished lecturer to come to Kellogg this academic year as part of the “2008 – 2009 Kellogg School of Management Distinguished Lecture Series.”
The Columbia University professor and renowned journalist, who has worked for The New York Times and Fortune among other publications, delivered a 45-minute speech titled “Globalization: Then and Now” followed by a short question and answer session.
The talk began with Nasar quipping that “globalization and financial crises go together like steroids and baseball,” then explaining how globalization turned the U.S. economic crisis into a world-wide ordeal.
The focus of her speech, however, was how “nations must create their own destinies” and Nasar’s own belief that the current notion of globalization as “a new, inevitable happening” is false.
Nasar pointed out that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ knowledge of globalization and the world’s openness to free trade as far back as 1848 is a sign of “globalization being rooted deep in economic history.”
She continued evoking globalization and financial crises’ roots in history by mentioning the first market crash in 1868, described by Engels as “a day of such wrath [that] has never been seen before.”
Nasar added that the world has seen “10 similar economic slowdowns since 1868,” using this as an example of situations similar to today’s status quo that the world has bounced back from.
The focus on the local rather than the international was another theme Nasar pressed upon, as she told the audience that the local component in economic success or failure is huge, and that the “driving force behind a successful economy was increased productivity.”
Nasar then presented a table demonstrating the percentage of U.S. total employment by sector. The table illustrated a marked drop in tradeables such as mining and agriculture from 80 percent of the economy in 1890 to only 13 percent in 2007, with a converse movement seen in the service sector which rose from a paltry 15 percent in 1890 to 82 percent in 2007.
All of this led to her conclusion that the journey back to a healthy economy would be a “marathon, not a sprint”: Each year of positive growth would lead to success in the long run; and in this global world, to be successful, you have to think locally.
According to Kellogg’s Web site, The Kellogg Speaker Series “is part of the school’s ongoing commitment to bring real-world insight into our academic discourse” by bringing in “leaders from the worlds of academia, journalism and business” to “address key issues and critical leadership challenges.”
Previous speakers have included Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, as well as Jon Meacham, author and Newsweek editor. Upcoming speakers include Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig on March 5 and analyst and author Alice Schroeder on April 6.
Kellogg Speaker Series organizer and Media Relations Director Megan Washburn emphasized that the series is open to the entire Northwestern community, and encouraged Northwestern undergraduates to attend in larger numbers to “take a deep dive on very current, and very relevant issues.”