false 1 14 false false Fri Jan 25 11:27:40 -0800 2008 Fri Jan 25 11:31:50 -0800 2008
From the Amazon review:

What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution that have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. This in itself should not be news to anyone. ... Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations or giant trade organizations like the World Bank, but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world (but especially in India and China) who can compete--and win--not just for low-wage manufacturing and information labor but, increasingly, for the highest-end research and design work as well.

One, duh. Two, Friedman really likes exclamation points! When discussing the most trivially obvious things! There's a user-created online encyclopedia called Wikipedia! Kids these days prefer playing sports video games to watching sports! The sky...it's blue! Commonplaces are presented with the aura of revelation, making me suspect that I am not in the target audience for this book. (His descriptions of technology are also painfully bad. Sometimes he explains acronyms and sometimes he doesn't. He just seems so proud of himself for learning what TCP/IP is for, but it's like watching your parents use the Web.)

The larger problem I'm having, however, is with his unscrutinized corporate cheerleading. He talks about the miracles of outsourcing and how a company can hire an Indian programmer in Bangalore for a fraction of what you'd pay an American, and hire a Chinese programmer for a fraction of what you'd pay an Indian. What he doesn't mention at all is the history of colonization that makes this economic disparity possible, or the fact that the wage pyramid is supported at every level by the mass of people doing worse on the bottom. The only discordant note is his paean to globalization is a mention that American workers will have to adjust to the new economy--but he even phrases this as an exciting new opportunity. He quotes a letter from Reuters's global managing editor, David Schlesinger, sent to the company when Reuters was about to fire a quarter of the staff to outsource to India:

...It's certainly difficult for for individuals to think about "their" work going away, being done thousands of miles away by someone being paid thousands of dollars less per year. But it's time to think about the opportunity as well as the pain, just as it's time to think about the obligations of off-shoring as well as the opportunities ... Every person, just as every corporation, must tend to his or her own economic destiny, just as our parents and grandparents in the mills, shoe shops, and factories did.

I would just like to take this moment to say: David Schlesinger, you are a douchebag, and I hope you go bald and discover your skull has ugly bumps and chicken pox scars.

Anyway, Friedman is so intent on the capitalist perspective that the vast injustice of the corporate system is invisible to him. His delight at discovering Wikipedia completely overshadows any analysis of just who benefits from the so-called flatness of the world--certainly not Reuters's American former employees. It's good for the Indian workers, at least on the short term, but they are already being seen as too pricey, and corporations are looking toward cheaper labor pools in China. Will it be Africa when the Chinese become seen as too expensive to employ? Reuters is apparently benefiting, but what is Reuters? A legal fiction, made into an entity in the reader's mind by linguistic slight of hand. In the end, the only people who win are Reuters's upper management and stockholders, and only the top few of those see any substantial benefit.

And that was just 100 or so pages in. I gave Friedman another 200 pages to grow a social conscience. He didn't, and I stopped reading.]]>