Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat Essay

In Friedman’s “It’s a Flat World, After All”, Friedman in a trip Bangalore, India accidentally “encountered the flattening of the world”. The following paper will analyze “It’s a Flat World, After All” and the flattening of the world. To conclude the paper I will summarize my thoughts on the flattening of the world.

Richard Florida’s article “The World is Spiky: Globalization Has Changed the Economic Playing Field, But Hasn’t Leveled It,” is a response to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s claim that globalization has caused the earth to become “flat.” Friedman argues that technology has made it possible to “innovate without having to emigrate” (Friedman, 590). Richard Florida argues that no matter how you measure it, economically, the world is far from flat- instead it consists of a select few tall peaks surrounded by small hills and valleys. Florida describes three types of cities: peaks, which are “cities that generate information... few in number, difficult to topple”; hills, which “manufacture the world’s established goods... they are prosperous but insecure”; and valleys, that have “little connection to the global economy and few immediate prospects”.

So far Thomas Friedman has identified three eras of globalization. Globalization 1.0 lasted from 1492 (when Columbus set sail to the ‘new world’) to 1800. Friedman describes this as when we “shrank the world from a size large to a size medium” (9). This era began discovering new lands and set up trade with outside civilizations. Globalization 2.0 lasted from 1800 to 2000 when the world transformed to a “size small” due to the industrial revolution and the expansion of multinational corporations. And finally, globalization 3.0 when the world went flat because of remarkable technological advancements. Other nations, including those in the third world category, are finally able to access vast amounts of knowledge, and their previously closed off economies are now open to provide more work for their people. The economies of these nations exploded from a large labor force and exportation, but the American economy didn’t do as great. From 2000 to 2014, the share of adults living in middle-income households fell in 203 of the 229 US metropolitan areas. Global commerce has been dominated by transnational companies that do not care for individual countries, but rather cheap wages and productivity, which undeveloped nations have. Jobs that require high school diplomas, or are plain simple, are either sold off to another country or automated. Automation is the replacement of human beings with robots or machines in order to reduce salary expenses and

People can no communicate, create, and transfer information within a split of the second. Friedman mentions "Globalization 1.0 and 2.0 were driven primarily by European and American individuals and businesses" (Friedman, 631.) What he means is business, and individual are interacting and integrating between one another in the Western and European world, but since; Globalization 3.0 is approaching at a rapid pace. Friedman stated (because it is flattening and shrinking the world, Globalization 3.0 is going to be more and more driven not only by individual but also by a much more diverse--- none-Western, nonwhite---group of individual" (Friedman, 631.) Even though India was the reason he came to the conclusion the world is flat, but during that time, China, Japan, and many other country are doing the same thing. This new era will be power by global market which is striving on competition, and those who can't catch up will be left behind.

The world is not a large and strange place anymore. The world is a place that is interconnected and intertwined. The world has become from a place that each country and their peoples are separate and isolated to a place that each country and their peoples are part of a global network. Thanks to globalization this is occurring. Globalization is the ‘international integration” or ‘de-bordering’ – “a number of highly disparate observations whose regular common denominator is the determination of a profound transformation of the traditional nation-state” (Von Bogdandy 2). Globalization is connecting different people from different cultures and backgrounds together. More and more corporations are entering new foreign markets to sell their

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”

Globalization is the process of world integration of ideas, cultures and economies. In the past five hundred years there were two major periods of globalization which have generated irreversible effects on the world. One period, began with the Age of Exploration in the late fifteenth century, and it spanned until the eighteen hundreds. The other period, the post WW II era, began in the middle of the twentieth century and continues today. Each of these eras marked a tremendous evolution in economic strength, religion, human rights, woman’s rights, agriculture and last but not least technology.

The famous cheerleader for globalization and author, Thomas Friedman, in his book The World is Flat argues that globalization is proceeding briskly because of the “flattening of the world”. What he means is that with the advent of information technology and seamless communications, any country in the world that has a pool of educated workers can aspire to jump on to the globalization bandwagon and benefit from the erasing of entry barriers. The point here is that countries like India have successfully leveraged the power of IT and communications to leapfrog the intermediate stage of manufacturing power that is required for economies to become fully fledged powerhouses.

Author Thomas L. Friedman analyses the technological advances that are creating a level economic playing field with previously disadvantaged countries rising in knowledge and wealth rivaling that of the United States and other world powers in the world. Telephone and computer technology, previously a stronghold only of developed countries, is now easily accessible and has been accessed and mastered by countries such as China and India, making these nations competitive. Friedman perceives the flattening effect as so insightful as to be compared in scope to the Industrial Revolution.

Globalization has shrunk the world. People can now have access to any market or any product they want very easily. We can buy Japan made camera without actually going to Japan, we can eat Iranian food in our university campus in Kuala Lumpur, can find coke and Mc D at any corner of the world, China can sell its products at very cheap price to consumers all over the world, Paris can get consumer for their fashion trend even outside their country.

Communication is a force behind globalization due to many reasons. One reason is the internet which has become affiliated with technological advances. According to a Journal of political science it states that, “Technology is an underlying cause, probably the chief underlying cause, of the complex phenomenon of globalization” (Koivukoski 810). Technology is considerably a significant source of globalization. The Internet makes the world narrow and easy to access which can lead to an increase of internet users annually. In order to communicate with anyone through the internet, an individual can just immediately click a button, and even see into their world with the use of webcams. The excessive amount of information over the Internet makes the world a

People around the world are more connected to each other than ever before. Information and money flow quicker than ever. Products produced in one part of a country are available to the rest of the world. It is much easier for people to travel, communicate and do business internationally. This whole phenomenon has been called globalization. Spurred on in the past by merchants, explorers, colonialists and internationalists, globalization has in more recent times been increasing rapidly due to improvements in communications, information and transport technology. It has also been encouraged by trade liberalization and financial market deregulation.

In view of Thomas Friedman’s work “It’s a flat world, after all”, the entire planet is turning into a global village due to a rapid growth of information technology. There are 10 major contributors, which were also named “flateners” by Friedman, that made the playing field level. Undoubtedly, current sophistication in technology has provided us great access to internet, a virtual platform where people are capable of communicating, sharing knowledge, or performing online activities. Globalization appears to have collapsed the concerns of space and time by outsourcing cheap labor from another continent to undertake the same task but with equal or better performance. To some extent, Friedman has brought about an

“Globalization is not just one impact of the new technologies that are reshaping the economies of the third millennium” (Thurow 19-31). When speaking of globalization, most people will not have a complete understanding as of what it actually means or what aspects of the world it affects. Globalization promotes free trade and creates jobs. The capital markets attract investors, resort cheap labor, and leads to job losses in some areas of higher wage. While all of this is happening, the world economy is being effected: economically, culturally, socially, and politically.

In today’s world, with a few notable exceptions, nearly everyone in every region of the world has access to the same products, information and services. A long-distance relationship is no longer so distant, since each party involved in the relationship can communicate through Skype, Facebook or through any of the vast amount of social media available. A person in Easter Island, one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world, can go to the other side of the world and travel to Canada. An economic crisis in Argentina could affect the economic landscape in Brazil. A person in Chile or Peru can buy an Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt because this transnational corporation decided to expand its market to developing countries, or as you might prefer, to emerging economies in South America. Although many of these examples might be trivial, these are the consequences of globalization.