Beach Books - We are the champions
Smile Southern California: You’re the Center of the Universe, by James Flanigan. Stanford General Books, 216 pages. $27.95
by Kevin Cody
“Doubts about the Los Angeles area were particularly strong after the 1994 quake,” observed Palos Verdes resident and then Los Angeles Times financial columnist James Flanigan in a 1997 Easy Reader interview.
“University professors were saying that without aerospace workers, Southern California was just a bunch of poor Mexicans. They said we should be trying to attract wealthy immigrants. I laughed.”
Flanigan grew up in an immigrant family. His father was a FOB Irishman who loaded trucks in a warehouse. His mother cleaned houses and served school lunches.
But it wasn’t simply an affinity for immigrants that convinced Flanigan that the Southern California economy would rebound with a vengeance.
“I couldn’t see how it would come back, but I’ve lived in places all over the world, in good time and in bad, and I knew that Southern California had a lot of advantages,” he said a decade ago.
Even in the current economy, it’s clear Flanigan’s confidence was not misplaced.
Geography, education, immigrants, and what New York Times writer Thomas Friedman has famously described as the Internet’s “flattening” effect have all come together, as Flanigan bluntly asserts in his new book, to make “Southern California…a center of the U.S. and world economies.”
Flanigan begins his case in the first chapter, “Global Trade, Local Industry,” by noting that 45 percent of all goods that come into the U.S. pass through the Los Angeles/Long Beach ports and LAX.
Flanigan was widely honored during his nearly two decades at the Los Angeles Times for making the economy, what 19th Century writer Thomas Carlyle, and every college student since has referred to as the “dismal science,” both understandable and entertaining.
He proves he’s retained that touch in Smile Southern California with case studies covering several South Bay businesses, which add personality and drama to the economic trends he identifies.
“Mattel even prefigured the global economy…[Barbie] was manufactured of ethylene produced in Taiwan from oil produced in Saudi Arabia, but she had nylon hair from Japan, and clothing from Italy…” he notes.
Though Barbie is assembled in China, that does not mean, as popularly believed, that China is getting the better of the deal.
“The trade deficit figures are totally bogus,” Mattel director and East West Bank chairman Dominic Ny tells Flanigan. China gets one fifth or less of the value of products it manufacturers, Flanigan writes.
“The truth is most of the value is reaped by the creator, designer and marketer of the product…”.
“That’s why Chinese business people are seeking to form partnerships with companies in Southern California – to own more parts of the supply chain,” he writes.
In subsequent chapters, Flanigan describes the roles of Southern California’s universities in developing the Internet (UCLA), Southern California businesses in developing broadband (Qualcom), and capital markets innovations (Michael Milken). Flanigan also explores the contributions of immigrants and the “Entertainment Industry in the Global Media Age.”
In the best tradition of journalism, Flanigan does the legwork necessary to gather the facts about California economy and then presents them in layman’s language. And unlike some better known, and very good books on globalization, “Smile Southern California lives up to its title promise of a fun read.
But it does leave unanswered whether it’s simple a coincidence that the author’s photo on the flyleaf bears a remarkable resemblance to the man in the plaid swim suit on the cover, lounging on the beach with a leggy blond. B