false 1911 0374292795 9780374292799 8947 1418 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1159164170m/1911.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1911.The_World_Is_Flat_A_Brief_History_of_the_Twenty_First_Century 18675 Thomas L. Friedman 17851 3103 1 2 false Mon Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Sep 08 01:14:50 -0700 2008 Thu Sep 25 16:53:44 -0700 2008
But you have to read between the lines. Friedman is openly supportive of globalization, and his presentation is generally from a corporate-level perspective with only occasional sorties into the gritty realities of the people who suffer because of it. I find his excessive focus on globalization's winners--India and China--disingenuous and his almost complete lack of any reference to Latin America and Africa disturbing. I find it irritating that he fails to decode the euphemisms that his executive interviewees commonly use, such as Wal-Mart's CEO referring to its "low-cost business culture" (which means no healthcare for employees). He has far too much faith in the magical power of markets to solve problems, breezily dismisses most of the serious objections to the current trends, and refuses to take seriously the social and psychological, in addition to economic, effects of globalization. But that's my political bent; your mileage may vary.

This book has two main problems unconnected to political philosophy. First, proponents of globalization, especially journalistic trendcasters, face an insoluble paradox. By their own accounts, what is happening right now is a drastic reorganization that is an order of magnitude larger than the Industrial Revolution, an order of magnitude faster, and accelerating all the time. Yet they talk about these revolutionary developments as if the changes can be managed by reformed healthcare and education policies. The Industrial Revolution was accompanied by massive dislocation, population migrations, revolutions, colonialism, wrenching poverty, industrialized total war, and so on. If globalization is really so huge and so fast, then pretending that the same--or worse--is not going to happen is just stupid.

Second, Friedman talks a lot about nations like India, China, and the U.S. with detailed policy critiques and prescriptions, but he seems to miss the logical result of globalization: the death of the nation-state. The free flow of capital and the internationalization of labor pools means transnational corporations with more money and more power than governments, with no national loyalties to tie them down and no serious rivals except each other. The erosion of the nation-state, and the imagined communities upon which modern identities are based, is as revolutionary a phenomenon as its formation in the first place, and that will necessarily change everything. I fail to understand why Friedman does not see the implications of the processes that he describes.

Anyhoo. It's worth reading, even if Friedman makes you as angry as he made me, because at the least it brings up some issues that people should really start thinking about more carefully.]]>