Book Review DON’T TELL FERDINAND AND ISABELLA THE…

Book Review
DON’T TELL FERDINAND AND ISABELLA
THE WORLD IS FLAT: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. 469 pages, $27.50 (ISBN 0-374-29288-4)

By Rick Mullin
Not many people today are startled by the fact that everyone from Taco Bell to Texas Instruments is doing business in Bangalore. This realization, however, shocked Thomas L. Friedman when he visited the city a couple of years ago. The trip also gave Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, the perfect metaphor for a world that he feels is fundamentally changed by the social, political, economic, and technological upheavals and megatrends of the last fifteen years.

His new book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, uses the concept of a worldwide level playing field to explain how individuals, companies, and nations—not to mention globally-dispersed terror networks—will martial collaborative technologies, primarily the Internet, to advance themselves in a landscape no longer demarcated by regional, national, and political boundaries.

Friedman, a rather high-minded hand wringer in general, mixes utopian optimism with grave misgivings, most of which hinging on regional and personal preparedness to take advantage of a flourish of big opportunities. As such, the flat world he describes will do much to advance countries we already see making great strides forward—most notably India, China, and the rest of Asia—while presenting Latin America, Africa, Europe and the U.S., with daunting challenges.

Friedman’s book is particularly critical of the Bush Administration for, as he sees it, focusing too much energy on a protracted war in Iraq and the boundless war on terror, and too little energy on preparing Americans to thrive in a highly competitive world. While the book is premised on the eradication of boundaries as a fait ascompli, much of the emphasis is, in fact, on the U.S., where for every hope of advancement Friedman sees several deeply disturbing countertrends. Many of these have been fairly well covered elsewhere.

Friedman devotes considerable space, for example, to contrasting a diligent work ethic and emphasis on science education in Asia with a sense of entitlement and dearth of ambition among American students that is matched only by the U.S. government’s neglect. He cites a 2004 study by the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, an industrial-academic coalition, calling for a 10- to 12% annual increase for the next four to seven years in the budgets of the National Science Foundation and other agencies that fund academic research in order to sustain current levels of job creation in the sciences. The 2005 budget passed by the Republican-led Congress last November, however, cut NSF’s $5.7 billion budget by more than 3%.

Another missed opportunity, according to Friedman, is the government’s failure to devote adequate funding to the development of clean alternative energy. Here he sees a massive black eye for the legacy of our current president. “Summoning all our energies and skills to produce a twenty-first-century fuel is George W. Bush’s opportunity to be both Nixon to China and JFK to the moon in one move,” Friedman writes.

He laments that there is more of a chance that he himself will go to the moon than that President Bush will take on the fossil fuel dependency that shackles the U.S. in very negative ways to another region of the so-called flat world, the Middle East. The problem, according to Friedman, is the same one at root of all lost opportunities in the flat world—a lack of imagination.

Friedman brings a kind of naïve enthusiasm to his encounters with things like modern technology, supply chain management, Internet entrepreneurs and outsourcing. Sadly, much of this comes from a kind of elitist detachment—at time he comes off like the elder President Bush confronting the price scanner at the local super market. He even titles his first chapter “While I was Sleeping.” And Friedman, recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes in journalism for coverage of the Middle East, can be infuriating at times in his lavish indulgence in every extravagance known to punditry (the effect is far worse when he speaks on TV or the radio).

Yet he overcomes all of this with his boundless journalistic inquisitiveness and his writer’s ability to “connect the dots.” Friedman excels at simplifying and communicating complex arrays of information, and his agenda is purely humanistic.

His technique of employing coincidental contrasts keeps things lively. He compares, for example, 11/9 to 9/11 (the Berlin Wall was opened to unrestricted transit on November, 9, 1989/al-Quaeda attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001) and David Needleman to Osama bin Laden (the founder of Jet Blue and the mastermind of 9/11 both, in Friedman’s words, started airlines using the same collaborative technologies in 1999). These contrasts also serve to clearly illustrate the potential for good and evil in Friedman’s compelling vision of the flat-worlded 21st Century.

This review appeared in Chemical & Engineering News.