The War for Wealth: The true story of globalization and how Western society can survive

LSE public lecture in association with the LSESU German Society

Globalization is the defining force of our lifetime, but most politicians have not understood the complexity of the process. Thus argues Gabor Steingart, in his controversial and thought-provoking new book The War for Wealth: The True Story of Globalization (McGraw-Hill, June 2008) which he will present for the first time in the UK.

Like most business men, the political elite believe that the global economy has created a win-win-situation: a flat world without borders and limits, promising everyone a fair chance. Steingart disagrees, "Unfortunately the flat-earth mentality is wrong, globalization is not a unifying force, but rather a divisive one." What he sees outside is a global shift in power and prosperity. Not satisfied with the doomsday scenarios which are so popular these days among the opponents of globalization, Steingart passionately advocates the foundation of the United States of the West, with a Harvard style first-class education for everybody and the first consumer revolution in world history.

Henry Kissinger calls Steingart's new book "a lucid and compelling reality check". Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the American Economic Policy Institute, says: "This is the essential book rethinking globalization".

Gabor Steingart is an international bestselling author and senior correspondent of Der Spiegel in Washington DC. He has been awarded the Economic Writer of the Year Award 2004 in Germany, and in 2007 he won the Helmut Schmidt Award for Advanced Journalism. His op-ed pieces are published in The Wall Street Journal and European Affairs. His weekly column 'West Wing - The Battle for the White House' appears on Spiegel Online, BusinessWeek.com and RealClearPolitics.com. With his critical view on Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama, Steingart has become a controversial figure in the US Media. His columns and op-eds are widely discussed in the blogosphere, from Foreign Affairs.com and myspace.com to the New Republican.com.

Steingart joined Der Spiegel in 1990 as an economic writer, responsible for covering the Eastern, formerly Communist part of Germany. He later served as a financial correspondent in Bonn, before the capital moved to Berlin. From 1993 to 2000 Steingart headed the economic department of a news magazine in Hamburg, before becoming bureau chief of Der Spiegel in Berlin. In 2007 he moved to the United States, as senior correspondent in Washington D.C.

Steingart studied economics and political science in Marburg and Berlin and graduated from the Freie Universität Berlin. In his thesis he focused on the reality of the planed economy in the socialist part of Germany and predicted the breakdown of the so called German Democratic Republic, GDR. After university he attended the Georg von Holtzbrinck School for Economic Journalism.

This lecture is organised in association with the LSE Students Union German Society.

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