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April 24, 2005

The Flattening of the World

"Thirty-five years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B+ student in Indianapolis or a genius in India, you’d rather be a B+ student in Indianapolis because you’d have a more comfortable life," said Pulitzer-prize winning author and New York Times columnits Thomas Friedman. He appeared on CNN Headline News to talk about his new book, "The World is Flat," about the globalization of economies, knowledge and information, and technology.

But attaining a comfortable life is harder in recent years, he said: "When the world goes flat, and that genius born in India can now plug and play and compete and collaborate as though they were next door. Being a B+ student in Indianapolis won’t quite cut it anymore." He said with the outsourcing of jobs, those in India "can still sit at home wearing saris and eating curry" while participating in the global market and effectively outdoing the average American worker.

Friedman said that technology and the internet have created a global platform, and stepping onto that platform over the past few years are the other world powers: Russia, China and India. The "flattening" of the world happened so fast that it took even him by surprise, he said. Over the past few years, in the shadow of the dot-com bust and 9/11 and the US wars on abstract concepts like terror, the world has flattened and become fiberoptically-connected network.

India's participation in particular has had an effect on outsourcing of American jobs abroad, but Friedman sees both sides:

Let’s look at the upside first of all. The fact is that the US is the largest recipient of outsourcing in the world. However the stuff that other countries outsource to us are not the small-end jobs. It’s things like advertising, accounting, design work. Go up and down the west coast, you’ll see huge service centers that are really the magnets for outsourcing all over the world. These are high-end jobs. If we put up walls to that, we suffer.

The bad part is if you are on the other end of the spectrum, your job is at risk of being outsourced.

The competition from other countries with the world's leading superpower, the U.S., could be bad news for the U.S. He mentions a quote from Bill Gates:

We had a remarkable thing happen about a month ago. Bill gates, the countries leading modern age industrialist, stood before the 50 governors and said American high school education is obsolete. He said our country is not producing the kind of engineers and scientists that are necessary to compete in the world.

To that, he added:

Parents used to tell him finish your dinner, people in inidia and china are starving. What I say to my girls is finish your homework, people in India and china are starving for your job.

On questions of how much this is a threat to the United States, he said that in the same way information and knowledge are made accessible and easily transferrable, terrorists and insurgents now have an easy recruiting tool. With television and the internet bringing humiliation to those defeated in wars and battles at 56k all over the world, potential defeat of insurgents in Iraq could serve as a recruiting tool for sympathetic Osama followers, for example, he said.

Friedman ends by saying he is optimistic that "connecting the knowledge pools" of the world will yield more good than evil.

Posted April 24, 2005 12:51 PM

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Posted by: roland sullivan at January 28, 2006 01:22 PM

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