Page 265 - The Drucker Lectures

246 [ The Drucker Lectures

works. And the political implications of this I don’t know. They
are very far-reaching.
In a way, information has always been mobile. There was no
way the czar’s secret police could really keep information out of
Russia. Yes, they sent some people to Siberia; they confiscated
things. But I’m just now reading a Dostoevsky book in which
one of the major themes is that information comes in from the
West and cannot be stopped.
So, in that sense, the globalization of information is nothing
so very new. But what is new is the sense that information no
longer knows any distance. I read a few days ago a very inter-
esting article about a survey made of young Germans who are
getting into the Internet. And they have absolutely no idea of
distance; to them, anybody on the Internet is next door. And
that is true of our young people, too. And so information has
enormous political and psychological implications, far more
than economic ones. But with information, yes—there you can
talk of globalization.
When you talk about money, things aren’t quite that simple.
The prevailing economic theory presumes that a country has
control of monetary policy and therefore its economy. By itself,
this doesn’t work anymore. Two hundred years ago, economists
defined resources as land, labor, and capital. All of them were
scarce. Today, there is far too much money in the world.
Let me say that money is no more multinational than it has
been for 700 years, since the beginning of the modern economy
in the thirteenth century. It was around 1235 when the letter
of credit was invented, making money mobile. Ever since then,
governments have been trying to control money. But now, it can
only work if there is a multinational alliance.
When you look, you see our Federal Reserve and president
trying very hard—and not without some effect—to use mone-
tary policy to control the American economy in concert with the