Customer Reviews

The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

5 star:		(499)
4 star:		(238)
3 star:		(130)
2 star:		(92)
1 star:		(121)

 

 

I'd forgotten the pleasure reading good prose brings. Friedman not only writes well, but does so on an important subject- globalization. He states, "It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world."

He claims, "When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate". But, how did the world `become flat'? Friedman suggest the trigger events were the collapse of communism, the dot-com bubble resulting in overinvestment in fiber-optic telecommunications, and the subsequent out-sourcing of engineers enlisted to fix the perceived Y2K problem.

Those events created an environment where products, services, and labor are cheaper. However, the West is now losing its strong-hold on economic dominance. Depending on if viewed from the eyes of a consumer or a producer - that's either good or bad, or a combination of both.

What is more sobering is Friedman's elaboration on Bill Gates' statement, "When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor's degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind."

Friedman sounds the alarm with a call for diligence and fortitude - academically, politically, and economically. He sees a dangerous complacency, from Washington down through the public school system. Students are no longer motivated. "In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears -- and that is our problem."

Questions I wish Friedman had explored in further detail are:

1. When should countries do what benefits the global economy, and when should they look out for their own interests? (protectionism, tariffs, quotas, etc.)
2. What will a `flat world' mean to the world's poor? (those living in Haiti, Angola, Kazakhstan, etc.)
3. What cultural values (or absence thereof) are contributing to the West's loss of productivity, education, and excellence? (morality, truth, religion, meaning, hope?)
4. How will further globalization effect cultural distinctions? (Are we heading towards a universal melting pot?)
5. What will a `flat world' mean environmentally - particularly for those countries on the verge of an economic explosion?

Tom Friedman is a well connected journalist. His columns appear on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and his previous works LONGITUDES AND ATTITUDES and THE LEXUS AND THE OLIVE TREE are part of the "conventional wisdom" of most American decision makers. This new book, THE WORLD IS FLAT will also find its way into the "conventional wisdom." Unfortunately, it is at best a misdiagnosis of the factors that have lead to the ability to substitute labor across geographical boundaries. However, although it is as wrong as could be, many of our power elites will read or hear of this, and will base their decisions on the assumption that this book contains the truth. The reason that you should read it is that it is conventional wisdom and you are perhaps better off understanding this and how it is wrong.

Friedman's explanation is a simple one - the world has transformed from a three dimensional phenomenon, a sphere, to a two dimensional flat plane where there are no entry barriers into the labor market. So, a radiologist in Boston can be easily substituted for a radiologist in Bangalore. Oh, how it would be nice if it were this simple. But alas it is not. Friedman, I believe, is well intentioned, but he mistakenly believes that he can find the truth through anecdotes. So, his empirical evidence comes from stories of things that he does not understand instead of the use of reliable demographic and economic databases.

He believes that 10 exogenous forces can explain how "the world became flat." While doing this, he solely looks at the labor market and ignores the effects of the consumer, monetary, raw material/energy, and fixed investment markets. He cannot distinguish between a symptom and a cause. These 10 forces that he claims changed the labor markets are not causes but merely symptoms.

Friedman is a name dropper par excellence, and rubs elbows with the elite. Unfortunately for him, he cannot detect competence or incompetence. One reason that this book will not age well is that when he wrote it in 2004 he was rubbing elbows with the incompetent elites such as Carly Fiorina who botched the merger between Compaq and Hewlett Packard and Nobuyuki Idei, the incompetent chairman of Sony. He praises these folks to win their favor, but reading this in 2005, demonstrates how little he knows.

A major problem that Friedman ignores is the inability of any government to impartially referee our global economy. No country has good corporate governance laws, and the US is becoming increasing unable to protect both intellectual and physical property rights. This problem creates new barriers and instead of flattening the world, it adds new walls and new traps. Poor corporate governance promotes crony capitalism and not the meritocracy capitalism that Friedman thinks it is supporting. Just look at the disconnect between executive pay and performance as evidence that many incompetent corporate chieftains are keeping their jobs and continuing to make poor decisions. American law is ineffective, the inability to sentence Health South's Scrushy shows that Sarbanes Oxley is not working, and the inability to put Ken Lay, Michael Eisner, and Michael Ovitz in prison shows how little protection the share holders have. Things are worse in China, India, and Japan where "transparency" is not even a part of the vocabulary.

The book is filled with inconsistency. It derides the inflexibility of the European welfare state, but calls for an American safety net to protect those from globalization. He calls for the enactment of "Hillary care" but cannot explain the reason that it failed passage in 1993. He praise the Asian "rote learning" systems, but later on calls on American youth to think unconventionally. He is calling on the federal government to do contradictory things such as keep minimum wages and promote market efficiency.

America's increasing indebtedness is not given one sentence in this book. Not only are jobs being exported to Southeast Asia, but claims and control on American assets are also being transferred. Increasingly, the important capital allocations in America will be directed by foreign executives who will be even less accountable than the Bernie Ebbers and the Ken Lays.

In short, Friedman is not qualified to write on this topic, but like the incompetent overpaid executive that he hangs with, he will be over paid and over read. At best, we might be able to profit if we understand how this "conventional wisdom" is wrong and then short sell the companies whose leaders make bad decisions based on this wrong analysis.

From the first few pages when Friedman leaps from level playing fields to a flat world, it is almost easy to understand why the cover shows ships falling off the edge of an un-flat world [NOTE: The current dust cover, changed since this review was written, no longer depicts ships falling off a 'flat' earth. You can draw your own conclusions as to the motives behind that decision.]. Something is missing here. "Level" is not "flat". And ships don't fall off a flat surface. Is he trying to be ironic? If so, Friedman ought to leave that to P.J. O'Rourke. If he thinks a "brief history" of the past five years is a funny concept, again I refer you to O'Rourke for more robust and pointed humor.

As a journalist, with seemingly unlimited resources and the once-gilded New York Times brand name behind him, Friedman has leveraged his basic skills into best-sellerdom, all the while seemingly in shock and awe of all the things his rich travel budget allows him to take in. Yet I have to ask, where's the beef?

Yes, the world has shifted from networks based on mythology and monarchies, through manufacturing and Marxism, to today's global marketing, but services aren't a new phenomenon; they've always been with us. And although wireless communication has made the world faster and more competitive, life is no more ruthless, violent or uncertain now than when plagues, expansive military conquest, disease, poor hygiene, inbred monarchies, and wealth-by-acquisition ruled the world as they have for most of human existence. Sure, technology has increased the pace, but each generation seems to think that the last generation had it slow and easy, and that has never been the case. The poor villager who wandered too far away from his hut 1,500 years ago experienced no less a shock than today's global traveler stepping off a plane in Mumbai.

And this outsourcing 'problem' is not new and it is not based simply on information technology. For as long as man has tried to better his life and to leverage his advantages, he has hired someone else to produce the things he needs, be it food, cooking, child care, or production. Like services, outsourcing is not new. That villager from 1,500 years ago thought that outsourcing crop production to the next village over was no less daunting or distant than Americans importing oranges from Israel or roses from Brazil. And you can bet the other villagers were mad as hell at him for taking away 'their' work.

For more than fifty years, columnists, pundits, journalists, armchair analysts, and bad economists have been intrigued by each new emerging economic superpower, from the Soviet Union, to the European Union, to Japan, to China, and now India, and each time all that wonderment and starry-eyed predictions have come to nothing. Like Ayn Rand said, what separates America from the rest of the world is that we were the first to think of making money, not just taking money. And America still does that very well. I still have my doubts about the sustainability of growth in China and India. Sooner or later they are going to hit a consumer-oriented economy and demands for many things their people don't demand today. Besides, their growth has been exaggerated by the fact that they started basically at zero. Bad analysts like straight-line extrapolations. Not only do these growth lines sometimes flatten out, they can nose dive. And what's bigger and more dramatic, 3% growth in a $11 trillion economy or 7% in a $200 million economy?

Maybe the world has become more homogenous with technology and communications. But anyone who thinks that there is some huge melting pot, in America or around the world, would be better served by recognizing the world as a salad bowl, not a melting pot. And neither the pot or bowl are flat.

I can't honestly agree with the gentleman who feels that this book was a reminder of how enjoyable good prose can be. This book has to have one of the most annoying styles I've ever suffered through. It seems to be written with a blend of "hey, look at me! look how clever and funny I am!", IT company advertising over-optimism of how well all the telecommunications technologies work and how they're going to change everything that ever existed in the world -so you better get ready-, and "look at how many CEO's I've had lunch with!"

Needless to say, it gets tiresome fast. By page 160 I wanted the author to just get to his point (which was overly repeated), and to leave all the attitude and overbearing style out of it. I usually read a book this size in about a week. After taking a month to get to page 200 I had to put it down for two weeks since I couldn't take anymore sentences like: "Now more people will be able to plug and play to get in touch with more people, more machines, more businesses, to share more data, more information, more stock quotes, more pornography, more whatever, at anywhere, at anytime, from anyplace, than ever before in the history of the world, thanks to digitization, virtualization, blah, blah, blah . . . " The above sentence would be fine as the last sentence of a chapter. Instead it's EVERY sentence in the whole book! Once I randomly flipped to one page and counted 11 uses of the word "any", and 3 rambling lists of "stuff" in a category instead of just mentioning that category. For example instead of saying "you could work from anywhere" the author feels compelled to say something like "you could work from the home, the beach house, the hotel, the mall, the park, on your way to the airport, the bullet train rushing past Mt. Fuji, blah, blah, blah, look at how many cool / cutesy places I can name! Did I mention I had lunch with a CEO, and that I discovered the world was flat? Let me do so again on THIS page in case you forgot from when I told you in the last paragraph already."

OK, now that I have that off my chest . . .

This book started out with a 5 star rating because it is a book about a very interesting and important topic, namely the way telecommunications / supply chain management / etc. are changing how business is being done (economic barriers of entry and importance of geographic location are being eliminated essentially) and how this affects the rest of the world. It loses a star for the fact that reading this book is a tremendous chore for the reasons outlined above. It loses another star for the fact that the author clearly talked only to CEO's and founders of the telecom companies, and not the engineers on the front lines using the software products he's talking about. As an engineer with a company mentioned in the book I have first hand, personal experience that some of the rosy picture he paints about how well the flat world works simply isn't true. Even with all the "steroids" and "flatteners" he talks about, the bottom line improvement in productivity just isn't as great as the CEO's who make the software will rave about in order to promote their product. In fact, when design teams become so outsourced all over the world, and so divorced from manufacturing you have the potential of wasting a lot of money instead of saving it. When IT as a business fad goes too far -and management loses sight of what they're really supposed to be doing instead of running with the let's have more IT herd- you end up with smart, highly paid people across the nation, if not the world, making and sending to each other powerpoint charts about a product / service they no longer have any real contact with or knowledge of.

Also be warned there's some significant, and slightly hypocritical at points, Bush and Republican bashing.

I'd cautiously recommend this book, but only for people who can put up with a LOT of attitude, and some political bias.

Friedman here explains how the development of various new technologies has made the world "flat." The exact meaning of this metaphor is somewhat elusive (it usually seems to mean the cost of doing work far away is lower; I guess "the world is small" seems clichéd). Friedman loves his metaphor: as the reviewer in The Economist (31 March 2005) put it, he "shows his readers no mercy, proceeding to flog this inaccurate and empty image to death over hundreds of pages."

Okay, enough on the metaphor. What about the content? The first half of the book tells how various technological advances (such as the world wide web, better supply chains, outsourcing, "insourcing," and much more) have lowered the cost of doing work and sharing information all over the world. I largely enjoyed this section. Friedman gives an interesting history of these technologies, and while he relies almost entirely on interview and anecdotal evidence, he provides enough of those that you start to believe him.

The second half of the book is full of advice for EVERYONE. Friedman has tips for young people getting an education, for U.S. companies, for the U.S. as a whole, for the developing world, for the Arab world. This part is spread pretty thin: the evidence on which he relies for one observation is the dinner commentary of his daughter's college roommate's graduate student boyfriend. Nice. In the midst of it all, I concede that he presents some interesting ideas.

Parts of the book feel sloppy, especially those parts dealing with the developing world. At one point, he says that "now ...almost every country has acquired a McDonald's except the worst rogues like North Korea [and] Iran." Actually, out of Sub-Saharan Africa's 48 nations, a total of 2 have a McDonald's. At another point, he quotes someone working in Mali as saying, "Apparently, everyone in Mali uses Linux." Wait, you mean everyone of the 1 in every 167 Malians who have any access to the internet uses Linux? Nice. (And that's not getting into the strange suggestion that developing countries should have a club modeled after AA called Developing Countries Anonymous.) Friedman has a few throw-away passages claiming that he knows that not everyone has access to these technologies, but he ignores the fact that his is a history of a small portion of the world.

Sloppiness aside, Friedman is refreshingly non-partisan. He also clearly put significant work into the Updated and Expanded edition. Unfortunately, the book feels way too long.

The Metacritic website, which aggregated the opinions of 22 reviewers from major publications (from The Nation to The Economist to The New York Times), gave the original release of Friedman's book a 53/100, so about half of reviewers liked the book. So if you want to learn about globalization and you're not an economist, what are your alternatives? An illuminating quote from The Economist's review: "A number of truly enlightening books have been published recently which not only support globalisation, but answer its critics and explain its complexities to the general reader--most notably Jagdish Bhagwati's `In Defence of Globalisation' and Martin Wolf's `Why Globalisation Works'... Anyone tempted to buy "The World is Flat" should hold back, and purchase instead Mr Bhagwati's book or Mr Wolf's."

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

I confess to being mildly disappointed whenever I encounter a massive Op-Ed without references, and can see in every page ideas that are undoubtedly the author's own, but have also been very ably explored by others--Kevin Kelly in Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World; Thomas Stewart, The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization; or Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, to name just three of hundreds of bleeding edge sources.

The core idea in this book, that individuals are now empowered and able to practice "C2C" (consumer to consumer or citizen to citizen), is not new. Most of us have been focusing on it since the mid-1990's when we started to tell the Pentagon that top-down command and control based on secret sources and unilateral action was history, being replaced by multilateral bottom up consesus based on open sources.

The heart of the book, the discussion of ten forces that flattened the world (basically, inter-connected the world in a manner unlike any seen before), makes it a solid airplane book, a fine way to spend a few hours.

The following sentence, on page 283, is alone worth the price of the book: "If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell sweeop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia onto the path of reform--which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil--strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming."

The book provides a good overview of the economic and intellectual challenges from China and India, and makes this memorable by jumping from "eat your dinner and think of the starving children in India" to "do your job well, or lose it to smarter more motivated young men and women from India."

Other more intellectually rigorous books (added 20 Dec 07):
Modern Strategy
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

The world is pretty darn flat when your having lunch with CEOs at Five Star Hotels. And the world may be quite flat from here to the Bangalore office but outside of the Bangalore office the drop off is very steep indeed - is everyone just ignoring that?. The world is only flat for the tiny percentage of college graduates in India and China - the rest of the vast population lives in the garbage of that tiny majority. This of course is the exact prescription for revolution. How long do you think the billion are going to put up living in the garbage of the million?.

You should always be suspicious of authors with "hand on my chin, looking wistful" portraits who write with cute little metaphors that are mistaken for "good prose" and insight.

If you want to read a truly enlightening, hard hitting and great book then read "Inside the Third World:The Anatomy of Poverty" by Paul Harrison. Globalization has not made and will not make any signifigant dent on the lives of these people, but Friedman, of course, didn't have lunch with any of them.

"Honey," I confided, "I think the world is flat." So concludes the autobiographical story that opens Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat," setting up the theme that dominates the remainder of the expanded edition's 566 pages. It's a clever phrase, but there's just one problem: What on earth does it mean?

Obviously, "the playing field of global commerce is becoming more level" isn't as much of a zinger. But it's surely a more accurate summation of Friedman's key points than the one that Friedman chooses, and repeats, and repeats, and repeats, ad nauseum. The discovery that the world was round heralded a boom of technology, ushered in the golden age of navigation, dispelled old fears, and put the lie to superstitious dogmas. And now Friedman is announcing that, no, it is in fact flat? What does he mean by that?

Is he saying that globalization trumps science? That fundamentalist ideologies are right? What? Of course, it's none of these things. He's saying the business playing field is being leveled. But though it may sound clever, "flat world" simply isn't a suitable replacement for "level playing field." It gets the point across, but only with difficulty. You buy it because it's the title of the book, not because it's a suitable metaphor.

And unfortunately this problem plagues the rest of the book. After you've wrestled with concepts like "steroids" and how they're supposed to be good for economic markets, or the difference between "reform retail" and "reform wholesale" (I still have no idea what either phrase describes; to me, the word pairings are totally meaningless), the various "flatteners," the class of workers Friedman calls "untouchables" (which, despite all his talk about globalization and India, has nothing to do with the Indian usage of the word), and on and on ... at some point you just give up. You accept these painful and poorly-chosen phrases because you must. They're what Friedman has built the book out of. They are his trademarks, his personal branding. You can't escape them in Friedman's prose any more than you can expect to eat at McDonald's without seeing any corporate messaging.

Adding insult to injury, the book is full of quotes from interviews where Friedman has obviously either badgered or coached the subject into using this exact same jargon. (I guarantee you, never once outside an interview with Thomas Friedman has Bill Gates stopped to wonder whether Microsoft is using all the right steroids in order to flatten the world.)

There are some insightful observations here, but for all the book's bloated length they aren't really all THAT insightful. And why should they be? Friedman is not, after all, an economist. He's not even a businessman. He's a writer, and while he can weave an entertaining narrative, he's really much better at self promotion than he is at turning a phrase.

Read this book if you want a feel for the zeitgeist of American business culture. I wouldn't dispute that it should be required reading for any college student today. Just don't expect any kind of masterpiece. Gloss over Friedman's self-aggrandizement and don't sweat his paper-thin metaphors, finish the book as quickly as you can, and then, fully prepped, move on to something else.

Thought provoking but could have been shortened to 1/3 the size. Examples started off interesting but later became redundant and rather tedious. He is certainly well connected , well travelled and well informed but it is almost as if Mr. Friedman wants us to know this about him- unfortunately, it can be perceived as slightly arrogant and the tone of the book smacks of smug narcissism. This may not have been his intent but I imagine that some readers could project these qualities onto the book. If you are looking for critical analysis- it is not here- this is a quick read, providing a superficial view of globalization- can be conceived of as a wonderful introductory text but unsatisfying in that there is no critical analysis or scholarly consideration of opposing view points. I believe this book is required reading for those interested in understanding one prespective on global change but I hope someone comes out with a more deeply analytic, critical exploration of the forces altering our world.

This is a glib, annoying book that states the obvious as gee-whiz fundamental revelations. Yes, all sorts of jobs are being outsourced to India and China. Who'd have thunk it? Yes, even tasks like taking orders in the fast-food restaurant car queues are being aggregated in offsite call centers linked to the restaurants by the internet. Gee whiz! (And, yes, audio quality sometimes isn't so good.)

Somehow, to generally increase my sense of annoyance with this book, author Friedman manages to insert himself into each "story" about outsourcing and flat-earthiness.

With all the statement of the obvious at great (and narcissitic) length, there's no real examination of the fundamental causes of the trends (other than the abundance of cheap fiber and cheap, educated labor in India and China). I'd like to see some discussion of the changing roles of corporations-as-states, the impact of Wall Street's requirements on these trends, and what these trends say about companies and their committments to customer service. You won't find anything about this in Friedman's book, and you probably won't find anything you don't already know.