The World Is Flat
(Thomas Friedman)
Flat world and the flawed bookThomas Friedman has written a fat, breathless, energetic, pointed, compelling, flawed book that may just have the right effect for the wrong reasons. The short version of his message is that, as America grows lazy, the world grows restless to usurp America's crown (or at least to shatter it). This is not news to any immigrant, but it may just be too many Americans. His genius lies in finding a compelling anecdote, usually in the form of an person of allegoric proportion; from this, however, he has a marked tendency to extrapolate wildly. While this can be suitably entertaining, sometimes in a rubber-necking sense, it should not be confused with actual social science. This book, then, is better and worse than Friedman's essays: better because he has the space and time to weave a stronger basis for his arguments, and worse because he almost fails to do so. Instead of one anecdote we get several, but that still doesn't make it social science. And just as hard cases make bad laws, compelling anecdotes can make bad policy (which dictum can be taken as a short history of protectionism). The book's superficial flaws are many. For the first third or so of the book, Craig Mundie of Microsoft could fairly demand co-authorship credit, so often does Friedman quote him. In general, Friedman rarely meets a quote he doesn't like (or so it seems). He is sometimes in such a rush that he even fails to get some basic facts right: mushing IT details, misunderstanding the ``law of large numbers'', thinking a post-doc is a degree, mixing up Hindi and Hindu, and so on. And his writing grates with its never-ending repetition of the notion of flatness (enough, already), his sometimes juvenile style, and the word-play, which eventually becomes all too much. It is, however, unfair to take Friedman to task for details; that is not his strength nor, to his fair, his point. What he does well is present a strong case for globalization along classically liberal lines.
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