![The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/410FGAGYGPL._AC_UL200_SR200,200_.jpg)
I am a big fan of Tom Friedman's books, but he is a journalist, not a social scientist. His method is simple: interview a lot of people around the world and then tell stories about them in order to build up an image of what is new and interesting. He likes to bring in anecdotes about himself, his family, and his friends. He also draws a lot of material from interviews with business leaders like Bill Gates and Craig Mundie of Microsoft, Craig Barrett of Intel, Vivek Paul of InfoSys, Sergey Brin of Google, and David Neeleman of JetBlue; former government officials like Thomas Pickering; and politicians like former president Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico. Occasionally he brings in the ideas of economists and political scientists. There is a breathlessness to the narrative as Friedman rushes around the globe from person to person, place to place, to obtain the latest gem of wisdom about the modern world.
Unlike most social scientists, Friedman does not limit himself to ideas that have been subjected to intense scrutiny by a community of theorists and empiricists. The elite interviews have a random quality, and are not selected systematically as they would have to have been in a work of social science. Friedman occasionally cites statistics that support his views, and rarely cites statistics that do not. Unlike an historian, Friedman makes only cursory attempts to put the ideas of his informants into a larger context. We are usually not told why a particular informant is making a particular argument, so it is up to the reader to guess when and where an informant is defending a vested interest. This makes for fascinating reading, but it is perhaps a bit dubious as a guide to policy and action.
The main idea put forward in this book is that the world is "flat." We do not get a definition of flatness until pp. 176-7, where Friedman says:
The net result of this convergence was the creation of a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration - the sharing of knowledge and work - in real time, without regard to geography, distance, or, in the near future, even language. No, not everyone has access yet to this platform, this playing field, but it is open today to more people in more places on more days in more ways than anything like it ever before in the history of the world. This is what I mean when I say the world has been flattened.
Flatness, in short, is quite a lot like globalization. Later on, Friedman admits that he knows that the world is not flat." Instead, he says, "the world has been shrinking and flattening for some time now, and that the process has quickened dramatically in recent years." (p. 375) What is missing is a clear distinction between a process and an end-state and a set of criteria by which to judge how far the process has gone toward that end-state.
The second chapter of the book enumerates ten "flatteners" that according to Friedman have resulted in "flatness." They are:
* The end of the Cold War (which makes almost everyone a potential participant in the world economy);
* The beginning of the "viral marketing" of software pioneered by Netscape after it became a private company;
* The invention of work flow software and supporting systems;
* The rise of the open source software movement;
* The outsourcing of work by multinational corporations (MNCs) to low-wage workers in India and China;
* The offshoring of certain important operations by MNCs;
* The rise of complex, international supply chains for many products and services;
* The penetration of many large firms by other firms provide serve and logistical support (UPS being a major example) which Friedman calls "insourcing;"
* "In-forming" - the rise of the search engines like Google and web portals like Yahoo; and
* "The steroids" - inventions like cell phones and wireless technology that enhance the flattening potential of the other flatteners.
In Chapter 3, Friedman argues that these flatteners made possible a triple convergence of computing, web-based telecommunications, and business practices that have changed forever the nature of international collaboration and competition: "The Berlin Wall came down, the Berlin mall opened up, and suddenly some 3 billion people who had been behind walls walked into the flattened global piazza." (p. 182) In Chapter 4, Friedman poses a number of puzzles that need to be sorted out as a result of the flattening process. He uses as an example the recent controversy in the state of Indiana about the outsourcing of the upgrading of state computer systems for the processing of welfare claims to an Indian company. The organizing questions for this chapter are "who owns what?" and "who's exploiting whom?"
The remaining chapters focus on the policy implications of flatness. Chapters 5-8 focus on the United States, Chapter 9 deals with the developing countries, Chapter 10 deals with business enterprises, and Chapters 11-12 deal with connections with military/strategic and security concerns, including the rise of terrorist networks like al-Qaeda.
The chapters on implications for the United States are quite well written and potentially of value to policy makers. Friedman puts a major stress on the need for public policies to help the American work force become more flexible and capable of adding greater value. In Chapter 7, he marshals statistics about the growing gap in the production of engineers and scientists between the United States and its competitors to argue for a renewed commitment to post-secondary science and engineering education:
...we should be embarking on an all-hands-on-deck, no-holds-barred, no-budget-too-large crash program for science and engineering education immediately. The fact that we are not doing so is our quiet crisis." (p. 275)
He stresses in Chapter 8 the need for better leadership, more focused social activism, and better parenting as part of an overall solution to the crisis. He calls for a new politics of "compassionate flatism" (p. 297) which characterizes neither of the two major political parties:
...we should be thinking about how collaboration between consumers and companies can provide an enormous amount of protection against the worst features of the flattening of the world, without opting for classic protectionism. (p. 302)
In Chapter 9, Friedman tries to explain why countries like China and India in the developing world are taking advantage of flatness, while countries in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa are falling further behind. He endorses the views of the World Bank that openness toward the world is a key to success and that preserving cultural insularity comes at great cost. He recommends that all developing countries embrace what he calls "reform retail" by which he means enabling "the greatest number of your people to have the best legal and institutional framework within which to innovate, start companies, and become attractive partners for those who want to collaborate with them from elsewhere in the world." (p. 317) This is not just good advice for the developing countries, in Friedman's view. As a result, some critics call Friedman a "neo-liberal."
One of Friedman's overriding concerns toward the end of the book is whether a flatter world will be a more peaceful world. In Chapter 12, he revisits the "McDonald's" theory of conflict from his 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, in which he posited that the probability of military conflict between two countries is lower if both countries host McDonald's restaurants. This theory is replaced here with the "Dell" theory of conflict, in which the probability of conflict is lower when two countries both participate in the same "supply chain." Thus, if China provides components for Taiwanese computers, the leaders of the two countries will be reluctant to start a war with one another. This would a hopeful feature of the new world, since global supply chains keep getting longer and the probability that any given two countries will be part of the same chain is generally increasing.
Friedman's analysis of al-Qaeda is one of the better aspects of this book. He argues that Al Qaeda is able to recruit suicide bombers from those who share its "islamo-leninist" world view (pp. 394-397), a radical political ideology that thrives on memories of a constructed Islamic past rather than dreams of a promising future. People in the Islamic world who admire Osama bin Laden share his feeling of "humiliation" over the dominance of the West and the lack of economic progress in Islamic countries:
If we have superior faith, and if our faith is all encompassing of religion, politics. and economics, why are others living so much better?
This is the source of the real cognitive dissonance for many Arab-Muslim youth - the sort of dissonance, and loss of self-esteem, that sparks rage and leads some of them to join violent groups and lash out at the world. It is also a sort of dissonance that leans many other, average folks, to give radical groups like al-Qaeda passive support. (p. 397)
The problem with shutting al-Qaeda down entirely is that that would mean shutting down the very infrastructure than has made flattening possible -- the global financial, communications, and transportation infrastructure that Walmart and al-Qaeda both depend upon. That is too large a price to pay, so instead Friedman recommends that people in Islamic countries be given hope for the future to replace their resentment about the past. The best way to do this, in his opinion, is to make it possible for innovation and entrepreneurship to thrive in a more democratic environment. His best argument for this is the lack of support for al-Qaeda in the second largest Islamic community in the world, i.e. in India.
All in all, The World is Flat, despite its flaws as a work of social science or history, offers a number of interesting ideas for further speculation and research. It goes beyond Friedman's earlier work on globalization by focusing on the technological and institutional underpinnings and by admitting that there are both winners and losers in the flattening process. It builds on Friedman's strengths as an analyst of politics in the Middle East and provides a new way of thinking about the war against terrorism. Finally, it offers some interesting ideas for policy reforms in both the industrialized and developing worlds. Not all of these ideas are new, but they are presented in a forceful and coherent manner.
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