The pundit and the money tree

Progressive, The, July, 2005 by Amitabh Pal

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century By Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 488 pages. $27.50.

In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman came up with something called the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which postulated that no two nations that contain a McDonald's outlet have ever fought each other. The theory fell apart when the United States bombed Yugoslavia.

Not to be deterred, Friedman comes up with a new hypothesis in The World Is Flat, which he names the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention. "The Dell Theory stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain. Because people embedded in major global supply chains don't want to fight old-time wars any more," he states.

The Dell Theory will also quite likely be proven wrong in the coming years, but that won't keep Friedman from extolling globalization's pacifying properties, as he has done over the past many years.

And as in his previous work, Friedman can't resist the impulse to be cutesy. Here he is explaining how cultural conservatives and labor are on one side in opposing globalization, with businessmen and the information industry on the other:

"The Passion of the Christ audience will be in the same trench with the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO, while the Hollywood and Wall Street liberals and the You've Got Mail crowd will be in the same trench with the high-tech workers of Silicon Valley and the global service providers of Manhattan and San Francisco," he writes. "It will be Mel Gibson and Jimmy Hoffa Jr. versus Bill Gates and Meg Ryan."

So infatuated is he with what he considers to be his cleverness that he employs absolutely horrendous metaphors of "vanilla" (representing a regular job), "chocolate sauce" (value-added job), and "the cherry on top" (the ultimate value-added job) to describe occupations in the United States. And he doesn't stop there. "In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears," Friedman writes. "In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears--and that is our problem."

His cheesy style gets in the way of his main point: Technological forces--such as the Internet and outsourcing--have altered the nature of the workplace so fundamentally that they have changed the world. This, Friedman argues, has affected everything ranging from the way you order burgers at drive ups (the orders are often taken at some remote location) to the way cartoon movies are made (teams in Bangalore, India, are frequently doing the animation) to the way computers are fixed (UPS runs a repair facility for Toshiba).

He says these technological innovations, combined with the almost universal adoption of free market economics, have leveled the playing field for developing countries--hence the odd title of the book. As a result, a few billion more people have entered into the global workforce, most significantly in India and China, creating enormous opportunities for them and significantly benefiting the world as a whole, Friedman contends. At the same time, this has created worrisome competition for American workers, since a lot of their jobs--in manufacturing and services--can be now shipped off to China or India.

The problem is that Friedman takes this thesis and then overstates it so greatly and pounds it home so hard that by the end you're left wincing. For much of the book, he makes it seem that these technological transformations are affecting almost everyone around the world. To cover his behind, he has one chapter that he dedicates to the "unflat world": people not benefiting from these changes, such as in rural areas in many parts of the globe, because they are left out of the technological loop. But the tone of the rest of the book is that everyone needs to get with the program of free trade, capitalism, and technological innovation.

Much of the book is dedicated to cataloging the business practices of corporations that have, according to Friedman, transformed the world. These entities include Wal-Mart, UPS, Yahoo, and Google, and Friedman's extensive interviews with their executives give the book the feel of a puff job.

Friedman's geeky enthusiasm leads him to hail every technological innovation as the next best thing since the microchip. So when he doesn't get a desired seat on a Southwest Airlines flight because many passengers themselves have printed out their boarding passes and are allowed to get on the plane earlier, he has an epiphany. " 'Friedman,' I said to myself, looking at this scene, 'you are so twentieth-century ... You are so Globalization 2.0.' In Globalization 1.0 there was a ticket agent. In Globalization 2.0 the e-ticket machine replaced the ticket agent. In Globalization 3.0 you are your own ticket agent."

While Friedman cautions that the dangers of outsourcing should not be overstated, he repeatedly raises the specter of people's jobs being sent overseas unless the American education system is overhauled or workers reinvent themselves. To prove his point, he cites a Forrester Research study that estimates that three million jobs will be sent abroad by 2015. But this translates into an annual loss of 300,000 jobs. Currently, there are 135 million jobs in the U.S. economy. So why is he making such a big deal out of this tiny fraction? And he exaggerates the importance of jobs being created in the developing world due to technological innovation, even as he admits that the high-tech sector employs just 0.2 percent of the workforce in India, his main example.