Thomas Friedman is, primarily, a columnist for the New York Times. Lately, his newspaper work has focused on the Bush administration and the war in the Middle East. He writes incisive, critical, analytical columns that ask questions about the way our country is handling itself in the rest of the world.
How is it, then, that he seems not to have heard of the rest of the world, or been introduced to the theory of challenging ideas? In his book The World is Flat, he claims to address “Globalization 3.0”—-according to him, the wave of globalization in which technology is and will continue to be the engine of all individuals becoming able to “act globally [p. 11];” that is, to have access to resources and services around the world and to succeed within and around them. A better title for the book might have been The United States, China, and India are Flat, as the rest of the world's countries never really make it into the book.
[...] He doesn't even try to ask the vital question of how to prevent China from backsliding into The Jungle, even though he almost asks it, which is more than I can say for the questions of how global politics enters the equation of this flat world of his, or how the world's very poor will fare in it, or how we'll come up with the energy to fuel all of this, or what it will do to world culture, or, as I mentioned before, the role of all the countries he leaves out of the flat world. [...]
[...] A big theme of The World is Flat is that the dot-com bust was as important if not more important to furthering globalization than the dot-com boom had been, because less-developed countries could become the “second buyer” of goods and services in which first-buyer countries had over invested. They could make their fortunes by picking up the pieces of other nations. Completely ignoring the millions of impoverished Indians who don't have access to running water, much less Wi-Fi, he points out that India first started to become a global player when America outsourced the problem of fixing Y2K computer glitches. [...]
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