The World Is Flat

For other uses, see The World Is Flat (disambiguation).

Friedman recounts many examples of companies based

in India and China that, by providing labor from typists
and call center operators to accountants and computer
programmers, have become integral parts of complex
global supply chains for companies such as Dell, AOL,
and Microsoft. Friedmans capitalist peace theory called
Dell Theory of Conict Prevention is discussed in the
books penultimate chapter.

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First

Century is an international bestselling book by Thomas
L. Friedman that analyzes globalization, primarily in the
early 21st century. The title is a metaphor for viewing the
world as a level playing eld in terms of commerce, where
all competitors have an equal opportunity. As the rst
edition cover illustration indicates, the title also alludes
to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies,
and individuals to remain competitive in a global market
where historical and geographical divisions are becoming
increasingly irrelevant.

Friedman repeatedly uses lists as an organizational device

to communicate key concepts, usually numbered, and often with a provocative label. Two example lists are the
ten forces that attened the world, and three points of
convergence.

Friedman himself is a strong advocate of these changes,

calling himself a free-trader and a compassionate
atist, and he criticizes societies that resist these 1.1 Ten atteners
changes. He emphasizes the inevitability of a rapid pace
of change and the extent to which emerging abilities of Friedman denes ten atteners that he sees as leveling
individuals and developing countries are creating many the global playing eld:
pressures on businesses and individuals in the United
States; he has special advice for Americans and for the
#1: Collapse of the Berlin Wall 11/9/89: Frieddeveloping world (but says almost nothing about Europe).
man called the attener, When the walls came
Friedmans is a popular work based on much personal redown, and the windows came up. The event not
search, travel, conversation, and reection. In his characonly symbolized the end of the Cold War, it allowed
teristic style, he combines in The World Is Flat conceppeople from the other side of the wall to join the ecotual analysis accessible to a broad public with personal
nomic mainstream. 11/9/89 is a discussion about
anecdotes and opinions. The book was rst released in
the Berlin Wall coming down, the fall of commu2005, was later released as an updated and expanded
nism, and the impact that Windows powered PCs
edition in 2006, and yet again released with additional up(personal computers) had on the ability of individdates in 2007 as further updated and expanded: Release
uals to create their own content and connect to one
3.0. The title was derived from a statement by Nandan
another. At that point, the basic platform for the revNilekani, the former CEO of Infosys.[1] The World is Flat
olution to follow was created: IBM PC, Windows,
won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs
a standardized graphical interface for word processBusiness Book of the Year Award in 2005.
ing, dial-up modems, a standardized tool for communication, and a global phone network.

#2: Netscape 8/9/95: Netscape went public at

the price of $28. Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots
as a communications medium used primarily by
early adopters and geeks to something that made
the Internet accessible to everyone from ve-yearolds to ninety-ve-year-olds. The digitization that
took place meant that everyday occurrences such as
words, les, lms, music, and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all
people across the world.

Summary

In his book, The World is Flat, Friedman recounts a journey to Bangalore, India, when he realized globalization
has changed core economic concepts.[2] In his opinion,
this attening is a product of a convergence of personal
computer with ber-optic micro cable with the rise of
work ow software. He termed this period as Globalization 3.0, dierentiating this period from the previous
Globalization 1.0 (in which countries and governments
were the main protagonists) and the Globalization 2.0
(in which multinational companies led the way in driving
global integration).

#3: Workow software: Friedmans catch-all for

the standards and technologies that allowed work to
1

1 SUMMARY
ow. The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved, as stated by Friedman. Friedman believes these rst three forces have
become a crude foundation of a whole new global
platform for collaboration. There was an emergence of software protocols (SMTP simple mail
transfer protocol; HTML the language that enabled anyone to design and publish documents that
could be transmitted to and read on any computer
anywhere) Standards on Standards. This is what
Friedman called the Genesis moment of the at
world. The net result is that people can work with
other people on more stu than ever before. This
created a global platform for multiple forms of collaboration. The next six atteners sprung from this
platform.

search engines is tremendous; for example, Friedman states that Google is now processing roughly
one billion searches per day, up from 150 million
just three years ago.
#10: The Steroids: Wireless, Voice over Internet, and le sharing. Personal digital devices like
mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol
(VoIP). Digital, Mobile, Personal and Virtual all
analog content and processes (from entertainment
to photography to word processing) can be digitized
and therefore shaped, manipulated and transmitted;
virtual these processes can be done at high speed
with total ease; mobile can be done anywhere, anytime by anyone; and personal can be done by you.

#4: Uploading: Communities uploading and col1.2 Proposed remedies

laborating on online projects. Examples include
open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. FriedThomas Friedman believes that to ght the quiet crisis of
man considers the phenomenon the most disruptive
a attening world, the United States work force should
force of all.
keep updating its work skills. Making the work force
#5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourc- more adaptable, Friedman argues, will keep it more eming has allowed companies to split service and man- ployable. He also suggests that the government makes it
ufacturing activities into components which can be easier to switch jobs by making retirement benets and
subcontracted and performed in the most ecient, health insurance less dependent on ones employer and
cost-eective way. This process became easier with by providing insurance that would partly cover a possible
the mass distribution of ber optic cables during the drop in income when changing jobs. Friedman also believes there should be more inspiration for youth to be sciintroduction of the World Wide Web.
entists, engineers, and mathematicians due to a decrease
#6: Oshoring: The internal relocation of a com- in the percentage of these professionals being American.
panys manufacturing or other processes to a foreign land to take advantage of less costly operations
there. Chinas entrance in the WTO (World Trade 1.3 Dell theory of Conict Prevention
Organization) allowed for greater competition in the
The Dell Theory of Conict Prevention, also known as
playing eld. Now countries such as Malaysia, Mexsimply the Dell Theory is a capitalist peace theory and is
ico, Brazil must compete against China and each
an updated version of his previous "Golden Arches Theother to have businesses oshore to them.
ory of Conict Prevention".
#7: Supply-chaining: Friedman compares the
modern retail supply chain to a river, and points
to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution,
and shipping.
#8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the companys employees perform services beyond shipping for another company. For example, UPS repairs Toshiba
computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done
at the UPS hub, by UPS employees.

The Dell Theory stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply
chain, like Dells, will ever ght a war against
each other as long as they are both part of the
same global supply chain.[3]

That is, as long as corporations have major supply chain

operations in countries other than that corporations home
country, those countries will never engage in armed conicts. This is due to the economic interdependence between nations that arises from a large corporation (such as
Dell) having supply chain operations in multiple global lo #9: Informing: Google and other search engines cations and the reluctance of developing nations (in which
and Wikipedia are the prime example. Never be- supply chain operations commonly take place) to give up
fore in the history of the planet have so many people their newfound wealth.
on their own had the ability to nd so much in- In his previous book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedformation about so many things and about so many man argued that no two nations with a McDonalds franother people, writes Friedman. The growth of chise had ever gone to war with one another: this was

3
known as the Golden Arches theory. Later, Friedman up- Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has been
graded that theory into the Dell Theory of Conict Pre- critical of Friedmans book. In Making Globalization
vention by saying that people or nations don't just want to Work, Stiglitz writes:
have a better standard of living as symbolized by McDonalds franchise in their downtown, but want to have the
Friedman is right that there have been dralump of the labour sector that is created by globalization.
matic changes in the global economy, in the
That is, developing nations do not want to risk the trust
global landscape; in some directions, the world
of the multi-national companies who venture into their
is much atter than it has ever been, with those
markets and include them in the global supply chain.
in various parts of the world being more connected than they have ever been, but the world
Thomas Friedman also warns that the Dell Theory should
is not at [] Not only is the world not at: in
not be interpreted as a guarantee that nations who are
many ways it has been getting less at.
deeply involved in global supply chains will not go to war
with each other. It rather means that the governments
of these nations and their citizens will have very heavy
economic costs to consider as they contemplate the possibility of war. These costs include the long-term loss of
the countrys protable participation in the global supply
chain.

Richard Florida expresses similar views in his 2005

Atlantic article The World is Spiky.[8]
John Gray, formerly a School Professor of European
Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science, wrote another critical review of Friedmans
book called The World is Round. In it, Gray conrms Friedmans assertion that globalization is making
the world more interconnected, and in some parts, richer,
but disputes the notion that globalization makes the world
more peaceful or free. Gray also declares, least of all
does it make it at.[9]

This theory relates with how conict prevention occurred

between India and Pakistan in their 2001 - 2002 nuclear
stando, where India was at risk of losing its global partners. The relationship between the Peoples Republic of
China and Taiwan was also cited as an example of this
theory - they both have strong supply relations with each
other and a war between the two seems very unlikely to- Geographers on the whole have been particularly critiday.
cal of Friedmans writings, views inuenced by the large
body of work within their eld demonstrating the uneven
nature of globalization, the strong inuence place still has
on peoples lives, and the dependent relationships that
2 Critical reception
have been established between the have and have-not regions in the current world-system. Geographer Harm de
The World is Flat received generally positive popular and Blij has detailed these arguments for the general public in
Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing Amercritical reception, and some negative criticism.
ica (2005) and The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny,
The Washington Post called the book an engrossing and Globalizations Rough Landscape (2008).
tour and an enthralling read. The review closed with,
We've no real idea how the 21st centurys history will Physicist Frank Duarte criticizes the concept of a at
unfold, but this terrically stimulating book will certainly world, in the context of Kodaks demise, by writing: In
2005 the hypothesis of a at world was used to support
inspire readers to start thinking it all through.[4]
the vision behind the... digital transformation. The noAn opposing viewpoint was found in a 2007 Foreign Pol- tion of a at world is completely erroneous even in a
icy magazine article, where Professor Pankaj Ghemawat metaphorical sense... By the summer of 2007... nearly
argued that 90% of the worlds phone calls, Web traf- 80 buildings in Kodak Park had already been demolished.
c, and investments are local, suggesting that Friedman This gave an ironic twist to the notion of a at world.[10]
has grossly exaggerated the signicance of the trends he
describes: Despite talk of a new, wired world where information, ideas, money, and people can move around
the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what 3 Editions
we consider globalization actually exists.[5][6] Indian de The World is Flat (1st ed.). Farrar, Straus and
velopment journalist P. Sainath, Rural Aairs Editor
Giroux. 2005. ISBN 0-374-29288-4. [The origfor The Hindu, says its not the world that is at, but
inal jacket illustration, reproducing the painting I
Thomas Friedmans brain is at.
Told You So by Ed Miracle, depicting a sailing ship
Some critics have pointed out that the book is written
falling o the edge of the world, was changed durfrom an American perspective. Friedmans work history
ing the print run due to copyright issues.[11] These
has been mostly with The New York Times, and this may
issues were settled in March, 2006.[12] ]
have inuenced the way in which the book was written
The World is Flat (Audiobook ed.). Audio Renais some would have preferred a book written in a more
sance. 2005. ISBN 1-59397-668-2.
inclusive voice.[7]

5
The World is Flat: Updated and Expanded (Release
2.0) (2nd ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2006.
ISBN 0-374-29279-5.
The World is Flat: Further Updated and Expanded
(Release 3.0) (2nd revised and expanded ed.). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2007. ISBN 0-374-292787.

References

[1] Daniel H. Pink (May 2005). Why the World Is Flat.

WIRED. Retrieved 2014-12-10.
[2] Warren Bass (April 3, 2005). The Great Leveling.
Washington Post. Retrieved 2007-09-06.
[3] The World is Flat (ISBN 1-59397-668-2), Thomas L.
Friedman, pg 421
[4] The Great Leveling. The Washington Post. 2005-0403. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
[5] Pankaj Ghemawat (March/April 2007). Why the World
Isn't Flat Foreignpolicy.com. (Subscription). Accessed
2008-04-03.
[6] Pankaj Ghemawat (March 2007). Why the world isn't at.
Foreign Policy. Accessed 2012-10-05.
[7] Peter Begley (2006). The World Is Flat: A Brief History
of the Twenty-First Century. Accessed 2006-11-06.
[8] Richard Florida (October 2005). The world is spiky.
Atlantic Monthly. Accessed 2009-05-09.
[9] Gray, John (2005). The World is Round. The New York
Review of Books (Trans. Array, Web ed.). pp. 19.
[10] F. J. Duarte, Laser Physicist (Optics Journal, New York,
2012) pp. 137-138.
[11] Justin Fox (October 17, 2005). A Painter Is Flat-Out
Flimammed. Fortune Magazine. Retrieved 2007-1021.
[12] http://humanlaw.typepad.com/humanlaw/2006/03/the_
world_is_fl.html

External links
Authors website

EXTERNAL LINKS

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

6.1

Text

The World Is Flat Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%20World%20Is%20Flat?oldid=650874913 Contributors: AxelBoldt, Deb,

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6.2

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6.3

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