Tuesday, April 22, 2008 | by nathan
The World is Flat 3.0 by Thomas L. Friedman
The World is Flat 3.0 by Thomas L. Friedman
I’ve been behind on book reviews lately, mostly because this book has really tripped me up. I get really super irritated every time I pick it up and have a hard time reading even a few sentences before I’m alternately bored, offended, and frightened by its entire premise.
Basically Friedman’s whole idea here is that through the magic of technology, the playing field is level for workers all over the world. So - when a company outsources a whole bunch of jobs to India, that’s great! It helps India’s economy! It helps companies!
Also - he sort of skates right over the fact that those workers in India are being paid a fraction of what the same workers would be paid in America. He doesn’t seem bothered at all by the fact that hundreds of hardworking Americans are losing jobs because we have a pesky minimum wage, and one that’s not even a living wage at that! Instead, he spends the entire book praising technology for making this utopia possible; it’s a world in which now, thanks to the internet, thanks to work-flow software, thanks to outsourcing, Americans will be free to enjoy our "creative" society without having to do pesky things like work in call centers.
I find these arguments so patently offensive that I’m not even completely sure how to counter them. I think what gets my goat the most about this is this stupid argument, which has basically been around since the advent of the Internet, that just because we are now able to do certain things - telecommuting, online shopping, controlling the bollocky temperature in our bloody houses when we’re not even there - means that, oh, we absolutely should do them.
It drives me nuts because it devalues the idea that human interaction and connection is important, and it drives a way of thinking that tells us that reading a book online is just every bit as good as actually reading a book. It gets to me because Friedman goes on and on about how wonderful all this outsourcing and telecommuting is for companies, but says very little about how it affects individuals, or communities, who’ve lost their jobs or factories or economies because of outsourcing.
I find it offensive because it implies that because now someone in India or China or Bangladesh can do call-center work, that must mean the playing field is level for everyone, everywhere. It’s an overly simplistic argument that essentially lets exploitive companies off easy while simultaneously repeating the great palace lie that the internet is somehow going to be the great savior of human culture.
I have nothing against the internet - clearly, I have a website. But to hear Thomas L. Friedman talk, you’d think that it was the single greatest thing to happen to humanity in its entire history, and I’m just not sure I buy that argument. I mean - if it wasn’t for the internet, you wouldn’t have to listen to some wannabe-luddite Ivy League dropout yammer on and on about a book he couldn’t stand in large part because of how interminably boring it is.
| library |
Comment by The Dirty Calvinist
Friedman is definitely overoptimistic. But his view is that of many economists, namely that some are worse off because of technology, but that overall we are better off. That argument is empirically true if economics is your only measure. Friedman also notes that companies are outsourcing to India because it is cheaper and that Americans in certain sectors are now competing with Indians. So if Americans want American-style high salaries, they are going to have to produce at that level. Hence the whole “chocolate sauce” argument.
Friedman’s other book on the subject, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”, deals with the internet as savior. No matter how much technology (the Lexus) improves, we will never get rid of the older aspects of human culture (the olive tree) and that much of the coming century’s history will be the unfolding of the conflict between the two.
What’s interesting is that much of the world’s suffering is caused by un-”flat”ness, where rich countries put up agricultural barriers impoverishing farmers in poor countries both directly and indirectly, where people cannot leave marginal and unproductive areas due to national borders (think Saharan Africa).
28 April 2008 10:01 pm
Comment by concerned citizen
I think you were absolutely spot-on when youwrote that Friedman “says very little about how it affects individuals, or communities, who?ve lost their jobs or factories or economies because of outsourcing.” Not only that, but he doesnt say much about all those milions of people in India and China whose life is now intolerable due to globalization, as compared to pre-globalization period.
Joseph Stiglitz ((Nobel winner for economics and was Chief Economist at World Bank) said while on a trip to India, that 600 million people from India (out of the one billion!) have been left out of the ?development? fold of globalization. So, obviously, all India is not going to migrate into middle class, if anything the inequality is far, far worse now, after the advent of globalization. Similarly newspaper reports have pointed out how Chinese workers are working in apalling conditions, to chhurn out the low cost products, with poor pay, cramped rooms, no accident or health insurance benefits, no job security, no overtime, long working hours - so who is actaully benefiting from this sort of globalization? Corporates ofcourse, and the few privileged people of India nd China who have been able to get educated in engineering and technology! Not the vast majority of population.
The small, but interesting book, by Aronica and Ramdoo, “The World is Flat? A Critical Analysis of Thomas Friedman’s New York Times Bestseller,” I found offers a very good counterperspective to Friedman’s book. It is a small book compared to the 600 page tome by Friedman, and aimed at the common man and students alike. The authors point to the fact that there isn’t a single table or data footnote in Friedman’s entire book.
“Globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution,” says Aronica.
You may want to see www.mkpress.com/flat
and watch www.mkpress.com/flatoverview.html
for an interesting counterperspective on Friedman’s
“The World is Flat”.
Also a really interesting 6 min wake-up call: Shift Happens! www.mkpress.com/ShiftExtreme.html
There is also a companion book listed: Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation
www.mkpress.com/extreme
http://www.mkpress.com/Extreme11minWMV.html
10 May 2008 10:01 am