World is flat

1. “But Friedman’s image of a flat earth is profoundly misleading – a view of the world from a seat in business class. Flatness is another way of describing the transnational search by companies for cheap labor, an image that misses the pervasiveness of global inequality and the fact that much of the developing world remains mired in poverty and misery. It also misses the importance of the global geopolitical hierarchy, which guarantees the provision of stability, property rights, and other international public goods. The rise of China and India is less about flatness than it is about dramatic upheavals in the mountains and valleys of the global geopolitical map”

Question: Do you agree or disagree with this view by a critic, and to what extent? Give reasons and explain your position?

Answer: In my opinion, Friedman does an outstanding job of convincing me and the reader that the world is flat because of technology. Also, he is a fantastic public speaker and I was very intrigued by his theories on globalization. However, in his speech at MIT I did notice him say the words “plug and play” a lot as he was speaking to the audience. Therefore, my first thought was how are the people around the world being able to afford computers and the internet. Thus, leading me to actually agree with this critic that Friedman title is a little misleading and missed the global inequality and the poverty of the world. I believe majority of the world would need to have access to the internet to make Friedman’s image of a flat world hold more truth. According to Salvador Rodriguez, “60% of world’s population still won’t have internet by the end of 2014” (http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-60-world-population-3-billion-internet-2014-20140507-story.html) On top of that, the world bank statistics show that 1.5 billion out of 2.3 billon people in both china and India earn less than 2 dollars a day. Therefore, the poverty is a very serious problem for these nations.