THE WORLD IS FLAT (A Brief History of the 21st Century), version 3.0, was published in 2007, two years after 1.0, and is written by Thomas Friedman, a New York Times reporter. Read today, it remains topical and informative, even though the world wide web has truly taken off since even a couple of years ago.
The title is a metaphor for the world as a level playing field, for computers and the internet now give all competitors throughout the blog an equal opportunity to compute in commerce. The title was inspired by by Nandan Nilekani, the former co-founder and CEO of Infosys, an outsourcing firm in India with 22,000 employees. Former, because Nilekani just left to head the National ID program to give those at the bottom a better chance at life.
Friedman describes the ten world flattteners:
#1: Collapse of Berlin Wall on 11/9/89/
#2: Netscape (8/9/95) opening up the world wide web.
#3: The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved.
#4: Uploading, or open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia.
#5: Outsourcing for work to be performed in the most efficient and cost-effective way.
#6: Offshoring to another country to take advantage of less costly operations. (In particular, Friedman harps on unions fighting #5 and #6 as a big part of the problem.)
#7: Supply-chaining, with Wal-Mart as a good example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping at an international scale.
#8: Insourcing, where a company does services for another.
#9: Search engines such as Google.
#10: Personal digital devices like cell phones, instant messaging, and iPods.
Friedman identifies the middle class as the key to the future success of any nation. This group (which can be as wide as you want it to be), needs to be well-educated, mobile, adaptable and innovative.
Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz has written that the world is much less flatter today and Richard Florida indicated that the world is spiky, but Friedman himself said, really, the world is not flat, yet. There are 3 billion people out there, certainly in Africa and much of India, who are on the outside with a wall of poverty standing in their way.
In the final chapter, Friedman offers the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention. Two countries that are connected to each other won’t wage war. This is a nice corollary to Rudy Rummel’s contention that no two democracies have waged a major war over the past 200 years, as reported in Chapter 1 of SIMPLE SOLUTIONS for Humanity.
The World is Flat, 3.0, is more than 600 pages long, so it will take a dedicated effort to complete. This is why it took me two years. I highly recommend it.
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Hurricane Carlos, now at 85 MPH, will strengthen over the next few days. It is heading for Hawaii.
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Ninety three countries have now visited this site: 2777-93-96
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