The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
By Pahl, Ronald H
Thomas Friedman. 2005. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
In 1492, Columbus accidentally ran into the Americas-if we are to believe the children’s nursery rhyme that we all know. He believed the world was round. Most scholars of his day and for centuries before-Copernicus. Bruno, and Galileo-also were certain that the world was round. Even the Church in its divine wisdom knew that the world was round, but it sent the Inquisition after anybody who disagreed with the belief that the sun revolved around the Earth.
So how can a journalist write a bestselling book, titled The World Is Flat, in the twenty-first century? Friedman says that recently-five hundred years after Columbus-a upper-level Indian engineer for Infosys in Bangalore, India, told him that the world was as flat as the nearest computer screen. That statement was a startling awakening for Friedman. The United States may pride itself on being the greatest imperial power during the early twenty-first century, but the massive outlay of undersea cables, broadband Internet, and the explosion of software, e-mail, and search engines have instantly connected every corner of the world by means of cheap, accessible computers. This explosion, says Friedman, has not only leveled the playing field across the world but also has made the world flat.
Friedman sees three great eras of globalization. The first lasted from 1492 to 1800 and was an era of countries and muscles, which shrank the world to a medium size. The change agent in the first era of globalization was brawn-how much muscle, horsepower, wind power, and steam power could a country generate and deploy to dominate an area of the world.
The second era lasted from roughly 1800 to 2000 and shrank the world from medium to small. The change agent in the second era was the multinational corporation. How many markets, how much labor, and how many resources could a large company such as the Dutch East India Company pull together during the Industrial Revolution? These were the major questions of the early second era of globalization. Falling transportation and communication costs were the major factor in the twentieth century segment of the second era and included more trains, telegraphs, telephones, satellites, fiber optic cable, and the new phenomena, the Internet. The major change agent of the second era was hardware-from the steam engine to the beginning of the Internet.
The third era of globalization. says Friedman, started in 2000 and shrank the world from small to tiny and made it a flat playing field. The change agent in this era is not nation-states or multinational corporations but individuals who collaborate and compete globally. Now it is not steam, horsepower, or hardware that drives the era. It is the sudden explosion of software created by individuals, in conjunction with fiberoptic cables and broadband, that has flattened the world. Suddenly, any person in any corner of this flat world can be instantly connected to every other corner of the world, to an accountant in India, a marketing representative in Thailand, or a distribution network in Brazil. In two seconds, they can all be connected, and an individual with a new idea can implement it across the world. The world is now truly flat, says Friedman. Some call it outsourcing.
What about established U.S. companies such as Cisco, Intel, IBM, General Motors, and Texas Instruments? Of those five companies, the Indian offices alone have filed more than one thousand patent applications with the U.S. Patent Office. A first-class Indian engineer works for $15,000 a year, whereas his equivalent in the United States earns $80,000. Japan is hiring Chinese engineers, fluent in Japanese, in Dalian. China, which is a one-hour flight northeast of Bejing, at one-third the salary of a Japanese engineer. McDonald’s-your friendly local hamburger joint-is centralizing its drive-thru ordering system, with calls to multiple drive-up locations all being handled by a central system. Rather than local part-timers, full-time drive-thru professionals handle orders faster with fewer errors, thereby reducing the cost of your next Big Mac.
Friedman describes ten forces that flattened the world as follows:
Flattener 1 is the fall of the Berlin Wall. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, or at least the first symbolic part of it was pushed over. It was a notice to the world that the old ways were failing, and new ways to do things had to be found, such as common computer standards across the world. It was not only in the West that people celebrated the fall; a young man named Osama bin Laden also cheered the demise of the Soviet Union. Although Ronald Reagan thought he had brought down the wall, so did Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Osama bin Laden.
Flattener 2 is Netscape. On August 9, 1995, Netscape, the first Internet company, went public. It made the Internet available not only to geeks but also to everyone, from five-year-olds to eightyfive-year-olds. The key for Netscape was its browser, which set off a commercial explosion for everything from books and music to data, inventories, and entertainment. It started the dot-corn bubble.
Flattener 3 is workflow software. Software such as Wild Brain enables technicians in India to read and analyze a medical X-ray from Maine while the doctors and patients are asleep. Cartoon features for Walt Disney could now be constructed around the clock in thirty different locations around the world. E-banking, e- brokerage transactions, and e-mail all interface smoothly because of workflow software.
Flattener 4 is Apache. As the first opensource coding platform, Apache enabled anyone to host a Web site and communicate with anyone else. Today, it still can be downloaded for free and is used to power two-thirds of the Web sites in the world.
Flattener 5 is outsourcing. India has no natural resources but has an excess capacity of brainpower. Although the political system of India has always been in shambles, its brainpower has done such amazing things as found Indian Institutes of Technology (ITT) across the country. The United States and the rest of the world have now discovered that there are top-rated and inexpensive technicians in any field from India. After inexpensive and favorable experiences with India, outsourcing to India and the rest of the world exploded since 2000.
Flattener 6 is offshoring. The term means that companies find a location in the world where companies can make their products at the cheapest cost but still retain their quality. China is the offshore capital of the world, with more than one hundred sixty cities of 1 million or more workers working for perhaps the lowest industrialized wages in the world. All other countries look to China to see what wages they are going to have to beat if they want a quality, inexpensive workforce. If other countries attempt to compete with China based on low wages, China can improve the quality of their products with only a minimal increase in the wage scale.
Flattener 7 is supply chaining. Wal-Mart’s supply chain is the largest in the world. It is centered at a 1.2 million square foot distribution center in Arkansas, with thousands of synchronized, computerized conveyor belts that move small and large boxes from storage to thousands of waiting trucks and airplanes for distribution. Every package is bar coded, and every movement of every package is scanned and stored in memory chips and sent on to the next station in minutes. From tennis shoes to computers, the efficiency of the supply system’s continual twenty-four-hour process saves money for the whole system. That is why Wal-Mart is the world’s largest company.
Flattener 8 is insourcing. United Parcel Service (UPS) and Federal Express (FedEx) are the world’s two major insourcers. UPS has reinvented itself as the world’s supply chain manager. UPS does not just deliver packages, it sychronizes global supply chains into a single efficient unit. It ships 13.5 million packages a day, generating more than $36 billion a year in sales. Any customer at any time of day may go online to contact UPS to locate a package. UPS responds immediately, telling the customer where the package is in the delivery process. That is insourcing.
Flattener 9 is in-forming. Google’s goal is to make all of the world’s knowledge easily accessible to everyone in the world in every language. In-forming is the ability of the individual to build and deploy each person’s own supply chain of information, knowledge, and entertainment. Google is hard at work doing that by providing more than 1 billion searches each day for individuals around the world.
Flattener 10 is hardware steroids. In Japan, those with a hand- held Palm Pilot or a wireless connection on their portable computers, whether they are in a rural village, on a bullet train, or in a tunnel, are instantly linked to the Internet. Hardware steroids are a good descriptions of what makes that possible. Today’s Intel Pentium 4 has a capacity of 10.8 billion instructions per second, and Japan is using these computerized steroids to the maximum. Is the United States using these hardware steroids to the maximum? Friedman clearly sees the United Sta\tes many years behind Japan in wireless Internet connectivity.
The World Is Flat is a powerful portrait of the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century and a must-read for all social studies teachers who want to prepare their students for decision making during the new century. Although many in the United States may see the events of September 11, 2001, and the Iraq War as the major issues of the new century, Friedman considers those issues trivial. He sees the big issues for the new century to be the ten global flatteners. The United States, with its head in the sand, is missing out on the massive global flattening and seems barely aware of it. Friedman’s book is a call for the United States to wake up, before it is too late.
RONALD H. PAHL
California State University-Fullerton
Executive Editor of The Social Studies
Copyright HELDREF PUBLICATIONS Nov/Dec 2005