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Why The Earth Is Flat?

Decent Essays

The book I have chosen to read was “The earth is flat”, by Thomas Friedman. This book began with Mr. Freiedman coming to the realization that the world is flat, meaning that technology has provided a level playing field across the world. He came to have this understanding while on a trip to India. While there he realized that intellectual property and investments could be delivered straight to his doorstep in America. Freidman also introduced the concept of globalization in chapter 1. This was broken up into globalization 1.0 which lasted until around the 1800s and shrank the earth from large to medium. Globalization 2.0 which lasted between 1800 and 2000 and made an even smaller world through global integration and multinational companies. …show more content…

Who’s being exploited? As an example he looks at a case involving Indiana vs India where the citizens of Indiana were outraged because the state was contacting a call center in India to outsource the unemployment department. This led to the states citizens being outraged and forced the cancelation of the contract. But he wonders who was being exploited, the government of Indiana for having to pay for higher wages by raising taxes on the individuals. Or the citizens of India who was asked to perform the jobs at a significantly smaller wage that the people of Indiana. This same chapter also dealt with the politics of how flat we should allow the world to get before we lose our identities. Things like how should we feel about workers in other countries working in slave like labor as long as we keep our prices low? And at what point does the world become too …show more content…

He argues that America has always led the world with its innovation in these fields and with the loss of so many trained individuals America would take a back seat to the rest of the world. He blames this on what he refers to as Americas “dirty little secrets”. Secret one was blames the generation that was motivated by scientific advancements like landing on the moon, now going into retirement. The second dirty little secret was the ambition gap. This is the fact that Americans often look down on low prestige jobs like call center operator, while people from other countries look highly upon these jobs. This can be attributed to so many Americans growing up with a sense of entitlement. The last dirty little secret is the education gap. America used to be the country that all other countries sent their kids to in order to get the best education, but as America’s education system declines other countries are increasing theirs. This has led to gifted individuals staying in their own countries instead of bringing knowledge and innovation to

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