Why friedmans world is flat

Friedman suggests what this brave new world will mean to all of us, in both the developed and the developing worlds. Stiglitz, The New York Times. You travel with him, meet his wife and kids, learn about his friends and sit in on his interviews…[This method] works in making complicated ideas accessible…Friedman has a flair for business reporting and finds amusing stories about Wal-Mart, UPS, Dell, and JetBlue, among others, that relate to his basic theme. You say that you don't want the antiglobalization movement to go away.

I've been a critic of the antiglobalization movement, and they've been a critic of me, but the one thing I respect about the movement is their authentic energy.

These are not people who don't care about the world. But if you want to direct your energy toward helping the poor, I believe the best way is not throwing a stone through a McDonald's window or protesting World Bank meetings. It's through local governance. When you start to improve local governance, you improve education, women's rights, transportation.

It's possible to go through your book and conclude it was written by a US senator who wants to run for president. There's a political agenda in this book.

Yes, absolutely. You call for portable benefits, lifelong learning, free trade, greater investment in science, government funding for tertiary education, a system of wage insurance. Uh, Mr. Friedman, are you running for president? Would you accept the vice presidential nomination?

I just want to get my Thursday column done! But you are outlining an explicit agenda. You can't be a citizen of this country and not be in a hair-pulling rage at the fact that we're at this inflection moment and nobody seems to be talking about the kind of policies we need to get through this flattening of the world, to get the most out of it and cushion the worst.

We need to have as focused, as serious, as energetic, as sacrificing a strategy for dealing with flatism as we did for communism. This is the challenge of our day.

Short of Washington fully embracing the Friedman doctrine, what should we be doing? For instance, what advice should we give to our kids? When I was growing up, my parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving. People in India and China are starving for your job. Think about your own childhood for a moment. If a teenage Tommy Friedman could somehow have been transported to , what do you think he would have found most surprising?

That you could go to PGA. That would have been amazing. Fall of the Berlin Wall The events of November 9, , tilted the worldwide balance of power toward democracies and free markets. Work flow software The rise of apps from PayPal to VPNs enabled faster, closer coordination among far-flung employees. Open-sourcing Self-organizing communities,-la Linux, launched a collaborative revolution.

Outsourcing Migrating business functions to India saved money and a third world economy. Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and New York Times op-ed contributor, claims that "When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. Friedman believes the world is flat in the sense that the competitive playing field between industrial and emerging market countries is leveling; and that individual entrepreneurs as well as companies, both large and small, are becoming part of a large, complex, global supply chain extending across oceans, with competition spanning entire continents.

The author suggest that the trigger events for this phenomenon were the collapse of communism, the dot-com bubble resulting in overinvestment in fiber-optic telecommunications , and the subsequent outsourcing of engineers enlisted to fix the perceived Y2K problem.

Yet we are only now beginning to feel and understand the full implications of these events. Whether we recognize it or not, globalization affects us all. The concerns caused by globalization are myriad, including economic, environmental, security, personal privacy, and other issues.

As Christians, however, we are first called to evaluate globalization by its effects on the poor. We must ask ourselves why some people in the world are poor and why others are not. Much human potential had previously been wasted in these countries when people were denied opportunity. However, with a combined population of 2. Life has always been challenging for many people, but for much of human history, the challenges were very different.

For instance, as recently as years ago, 90 percent of Americans worked in agriculture. Growing enough food to survive was a major task, but people seldom needed to worry that their lives would be affected by events on the other side of the world.

Today, the situation is reversed: There is little danger of famine caused by local crop failure, but there are major challenges from distant economic competitors linked to global networks. For those of us who are educators, Thomas Friedman reminds us of other important responsibilities as well.