Summary Of The World Is Flat By Thomas Friedman

Answer 1:
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author, claims in his book titled, ‘The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century ’(2005), that globalization and technology has flattened the world to a ‘level playing field’. He analyses the ten ‘flatteners’ or events that happened over a period of around ten years to make the world go flat. The first flattener, that Friedman writes about, was the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and end of the Cold War, that brought forward the idea of a globalized world, where people from either side of the wall could collaborate for the overall economic benefit. It was around this time that Windows powered PC’s changed the way humans interacted with computers by providing a Graphical
User Interface (GUI).
Also, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), effective 2006 was aimed at lowering trade barriers by reducing the trade tariffs by ninety percent between Brunei, Chile, Singapore and New Zealand. People began seeing the benefits of the globalized world. The second event, Friedman claims, is the launch of the Web browser-Netscape, which got the world on the Internet. The third and the most important one was the ‘workflow software’, which he said was the “Genesis moment of the flat world”, since a series of events followed as a result of technologies that allowed work to be done collaboratively around the world. The events that form the next six flatteners included ‘Uploading’, ’Outsourcing’, ’Insourcing’, ’Offshoring’, ‘Supply-Chaining’ and ‘Informing’. The final one, which Friedman calls ‘The Steroids’, boosted this globalized work collaboration such that people were able to do anything, anywhere and anytime. These included personal digital devices, wireless access that brought mobility at super
fast speeds.
Friedman’s book created quite a stir among people, some of whom agreed to his claim while some felt otherwise. Pankaj Ghemawat, a prolific speaker and author, expressed a different view of the global economy. He contradicts Friedman’s claim in his article, ‘Why the World Isn’t Flat’ (2007), where he writes, “Despite talk of a new, wired world where information, ideas, money, and people can move around the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what we consider globalization actually exists." He substantiates his claim by providing data of phone calls and web traffic, more than 90% of which is not global. Also, the immigration and trade rates, even though higher than ever, are only at about 5% and 20% respectively. As a matter of fact, he believes that its only the big cities like New York and London that have achieved ‘modern global integration’, while the smaller ones are far behind. This brings us to Richard Florida’s claim that globalization has ‘changed the economic playing field’ but has not yet ‘leveled it’. Instead of making the world flat, it has made the world ‘spiky’, in the sense that the big cities spike high above the smaller ones, which has led to numerous social disparity and economic issues such as widening gap between rich and poor, rising stress on the resources of big cities, political tensions etc. Peter Dicken, a prominent economic geographer, has a view similar to Richard Florida, as he mentions in his article ‘The World is “Not” Flat: The Intense Geographical Unevenness of Globalization’ that even though technological innovation has ‘compressed time-space’ in transport and communications, it has done so only for major cities around the world, while the small rural areas are still disconnected from the globalized economy. Gabor Steingart, German journalist and author, also contradicted Friedman’s view in his book titled, ‘The War for Wealth - The True Story of Globalization, or Why the Flat World is Broken’ (2008). He explains how globalization is producing a ‘large number of winners and losers’ leading to shifts in industry, labor markets, political powers and economic conditions.
In my opinion, the world has long way to go before it really becomes ‘flat’.
The ‘flat’ world described by Friedman is definitely a more ‘connected world’ rather than a ‘level playing field’ since countries around the world have different political, social and economic conditions which make it rather ‘unflat’ . Richard Florida is quite right in his statement of the world being ‘spikey’ and, I would like to suggest ten ‘anti-flatteners’ or reasons that reflect the falt that we are far from being a truly flat or leveled world. The first and a very important one is ‘income inequality’. Even though people are able to collaborate and we have a global labor market, there is high wage gap at both domestic and international level.Global trade has moved the industry to developing nations, giving rise to sweatshops and child labor to drive down costs of production. Despite the efforts of organizations like Fair Factories Clearinghouse, which aim at improving workplaces for the labor class, there are many countries where it is still prevalent. The second ‘anti-flattener’ is ‘urbanization’, due to which the stress on the resources of global urban areas like New York city is increasing, leading to an imbalance of distribution of work and wages around the country as well as internationally. It also leads to problems of overcrowding of few cities. Kenichi Ohmae says we live in a “borderless world” . However, the third reason why the world is not flat is ‘borders’ and ‘war’. Even though
Friedman claims that walls have gone down, countries still have build walls from military and missiles. In future, we might even see more countries with Israel’s Iron Dome making the walls go higher up. Fourth is ‘Cyber-boundaries’, while geographical boundaries were not enough, China has built their own ‘firewall’ and other countries have a lot of content that is not available to people accessing it from outside the country. As Ghemawat puts it, ‘We're more wired, but no more "global."’ Next comes the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of the global economy. There are few people who are benefitting from Friedman’s ‘flat world’ and while there are a lot who are suffering the consequences of it. The winners are wealthier than ever, while globalization is a ‘tsunami ready to wreck the world’ of the poor. There is not even a single country with a gini index of zero or even close to that. The sixth one is ‘global traffic’ The next two are ‘overpopulation’ and ‘unemployment’. As technology is making more and more tasks automated, the traditional jobs are shifting to new fields. This leads to unemployment of people who are not skilled at upgrading their skills with the changing trends in technology. In US alone, between 1990 and 2008, the number of employed workers in the United States grew from about 122 million to about 149 million. They also bear even greater competition from not just the locals, but from people around the world, and that number keeps increasing with the rise in world population. The ninth anti-flattener is ‘lack of internet’ around rural areas around the world where people have little or no access to the internet and are not adept at using technology. The last one is ‘political inequality’ where a few powerful nations dominate the smaller and less powerful ones.

In my opinion, Friedman’s flattener’s are more ‘connectors’ of the global world rather than ‘levelers’. Many writers have called the world ‘spiky’, ’lumpy’, ’curvy’ and many other things except for ‘flat’. And like other things, Globalization brings with itself a plethora of advantages and disadvantages, the rise in technology indeed makes life easier but also pushes up the various problems described above. We are far from a truly globalized world in the sense of Friedman’s ‘level playing field’. What the future beholds and whether globalization and technology are really able to bridge the gap is difficult to predict. It is something that only time will tell.