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The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (精装)
by Thomas L. Friedman
| Category:
Non-fiction, Globalization, Outsourcing, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 288.00
MSL price:
¥ 258.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A thought-provoking read on globalization and the future of our world. |
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AllReviews |
  1 2 Total 2 pages 13 items |
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M. Asselin (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat is a book that, with self-examination and some gumption, could change your life. What begins as a somewhat verbose examination of the forces shaping the "flattening" of the world - the leveling of "the global competitive playing field" (p. 8) which is creating a more tightly knit, more integrated community - in the second half turns into a cogent exposition and reflection on the crisis/opportunity Americans face in the post 9-11 world. It is a sober examination of the dangers of the era in which we live, but not one without an offering of hope. Friedman notes that a nation with more memories than dreams is in trouble. He reminds us that America was once known by the world as a nation of dream creation and realization. The politics of post 9-11 America has erased much of that good impression, and threatens to make us turn more to our memories. It's not too late to change course to restore the focus on dreams - on our future - but we must act now.
Chapter Seven, "The Quiet Crisis," should be mandatory reading for every parent, every educator, and every policymaker. It is a trenchant analysis of the failures of the American education system, and an indictment of our society for neglecting to inspire our young people to choose math, science, engineering, and technology fields as careers. We do so at the peril of our nation's - in fact our children's - future.
If Chapter Seven was required reading for the parent, Chapter Eight, "This Is Not a Test," should be read by every manager, CEO, and government official. Here, Friedman points out that "lifetime employment is a form of fat that a flat world simply cannot sustain any longer" (p. 284). In its place, Friedman argues for a policy of "lifetime employability," a social contract between government and business and the people that, in its simplest terms, guarantees "that government and companies will focus on giving you the tools to make you more lifetime employable." In this chapter, Friedman also argues in favor of the universal portability of pensions and health care.
What moved me most in this book were the stories Friedman tells of individuals who are really making a difference in the flat world, e.g., the Harvard business grads that set up a company in Cambodia to conduct data entry, and a businessman in India who set up a school for the Untouchables. When Friedman asks the second grade children of the Untouchables what they want to be when they grow up - "an astronaut, a doctor," etc (p. 468) - it brought tears to my eyes. These should cause us to look at our own roles in the world and ask ourselves, Are we doing enough good, giving enough back to our nation, to our world?
We live in a dangerous world; what Friedman calls the Islamo-Leninists are dedicated to our destruction. Friedman makes a convincing case that these terrorists live in societies that haven't yet really experienced the flat world (though, in their planning and executing terrorist activities they exploit the tools of the flat world). The goal for all of us is to help those societies become integrated into the flat world so that their populations will have a sense of a future, like those children of the Untouchables mentioned above. When their societies have more dreams than memories, then, Friedman argues, we will begin to have a safer, more prosperous, and happier world.
The first half of the book goes on a bit long, like one of those famously endless New Yorker articles that appear in that great magazine. Friedman is not averse to using the overly cute rhetorical phrase. But these literary blemishes do not detract from the book's strengths. With THE WORLD IS FLAT, Friedman has made a terrific contribution to the discourse on contemporary America and globalization.
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Rick (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
This week I finished The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman. It was a monumental accomplishment because rarely do I scream at, deride, and throw a book as much as this one. It wasn't that it was awful in every way. It wasn't. In places it was enjoyable and often it was correct in its analysis, but it was so incomplete as to infuriate me while reading.
First of all, the world is not flat, it's a horrible title. Technology has warped time and space in the new world, making all points closer, all communication instantaneous, and all tasks shorter, easier or both. Technology has changed our world for the better in some cases and for the worse in others, but it's flattened nothing.
Friedman doesn't offer any original ideas in this book - none of his own anyway. Instead he offers unabashed cheerleading for multinational corporatism while giving short shrift to the displaced and disenfranchised left in its wake. For example, his lightweight assessment that if every country would just get to a point in its progression (or regression, as I see it) to accept a national network of McDonald's franchises, there would be world peace. This brought by his professional analysis that McDonald's is the epitome of civilization and the truly civilized don't war with each other (instead they just dominate weaker nations, molding them in their own image).
It's not a book about what's happening and how we can make the best of it so much as it's a book about who Friedman knows and what they'll tell him on the record. It reads like a distorted Connections column with the author bouncing from CEO to CEO getting soundbites of positive stock analysis and everything's fine rosy idealism from those who ignore the fates of those they unemploy or underemploy. He's very proud of who he knows and expects the reader to be awestruck as well.
It's his claim that we're behind in science and mathematics because we're too lazy for the difficult subjects. That's dumber than believing Americans are stupid. Why would kids major in subjects that CEOs are outsourcing and undervaluing when all the real money in America is going to teams of corporate lawyers and inexperienced administrators? It makes no sense of invest tens of thousands of dollars a year for an education and choose to major in something with ever-decreasing job prospects. If we want to recover our technological advantage, there's going to have to be major incentive for innovation and invention within our nation - something like a new moon landing program.
I can only recommend this book to those who've been living in a cave for the past decade and haven't any idea that company phones are being answered in India and China is a really big country with a lot of potential consumers.
(A negative review. MSL remarks.)
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-26 00:00>
Thomas Friedman has some apparently hidden assumptions he believes are perfectly OK. I don't. Here are some:
1) If a technology prospers, jump on the bandwagon so you aren't left behind. This view lacks any moral philosophy. Computers are in schools. Thus, your school should have computers. Are computers the best thing for school systems to spend money on? I guess Friedman would say so. How about increasing teacher salaries? The 50% of beginning teachers burn out within 5 years. Public school teachers in many urban settings can't speak grammatically correct English. Who cares! They should learn e-mail lingo anyway. Become an expert in videogame design. I guess Al-Quaeda picked up on that one. They use a video game whose goal is to destroy American cities as a recruitment tool, etc.
2) Friedman equates education with tech progress. Never mind that the best innovators drop out of school. Bill Gates is the obvious example. Does the percentage of of IT and other high tech majors determine a country's economic health? Even if you find a correlation, how do you know it was their education that inspired them. Maybe they are innovative DESPITE their education.
3) What it means to be an American is relative to one's time, Friedman seems to believe. So, if world is becoming a mass of competing commercial interests, well America, just dive right in. Be a consumer and/or entrepreneur, preferably both. Never mind about being a citizen or an advocate. Who cares? In fact, why bother working with N. Korea and Iran using diplomacy and communication. Let's send out a bid for developing a Korean-seeking and Iranian-seeking WMD. No muss, no fuss. And you'll be the envy of your colleagues.
4) Accept propaganda. Whatever is going to be the next big thing, well be sure to be a part of it. Don't question it, challenge it, or defy it. Don't ask your tech support person on the phone who is communicating to you from Southeast Asia how she got a name like "Jennifer" or how he got a name like "Todd." It's just the global popularity of American names. See, globalization does work. When I get a response like that I say "I bet that isn't your real name." It won't change things, but I don't have to go along with the pretense.
5)You have no choice but to play the game, and if you play the game you better win the game. This is the claptrap M.B.A. professors tell their students about competition without reminding them that they will all be competing against each other with the same information. Friedman seems himself to be a victim of propaganda, i.e., the ultimate victory of propaganda is to make losers feel like winners. I see this everyday on the 495 beltway around DC. Hundreds of thousands of commuters in their high-end S.U.V.'s ready to run one another off the road in order to get to and from that high powered job. Commuting time is 2+ hours a day, family life is destroyed (not to mention the environment), nerves are tense, the percentage of chiropractors and orthopedists and pain specialists must be the most dense in the world as these 'winners' destroy their spines, get carpal tunnel syndrome, and never exercise since their combined sitting, driving time is 11 hours a day. But hey, they're winners.
6. When things go badly, put a sh_t eating grin on your face (aka George Bush syndrome) and tell a few uplifting stories. When Friedman was lauding the new world order with the destruction of Iraq/Saddam, he spent his time with sweet anecdotes of Iraqi kids eating Hershey bars to show how well the Iraq situation going.
I have a list of 10. But I'm not getting paid for this, so I'll stop here, unlike Friedman, who gets paid for the very low-tech skill of writing journalistic prose. No wonder he takes so long to make a point.
(A negative review. MSL remarks.)
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