Michael quotes from "The World is Flat" (a book that I still haven’t read but have heard Tom Friedman talk about)

Tribal culture and thinking still dominate in many Arab countries, and the tribal mind-set is also anathema to collaboration. What is the motto of the tribalist?

Me and my brother against my cousin; me, my brother and my cousin against the outsider.

And what is the motto of the globalists, those who build collaborative supply chains?

Me and my brother and my cousin, three friends from childhood, four people in Australia, two in Beijing, six in Bangalore, three from Germany, and four people we’ve met only over the Internet all make up a single, global, supply chain.

I’d add that this view is not at all limited to many parts of the Arab world, in fact it has nothing to do with being Arab. But this quotes vividly illustrates why I sometimes think that not only is the future not evenly distributed, but that the unevenness might be increasing rather than shrinking: tribal thinking hasn’t evolved much in many hundreds or thousands of years, while these kinds of globalists have only emerged in the last 10 or 20 years. We got to remind ourselves of that unevenness every time we reach beyond Silicon Valley, or the US, or “the West” or whatever our particular bubble is within which we grew up …