Summary Of The World Is Flat By Thomas Friedman

Answer 1:
Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author, claims in his book titled, ‘The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century ’(2005), that globalization and technology has flattened the world to a ‘level playing field’. He analyses the ten ‘flatteners’ or events that happened over a period of around ten years to make the world go flat. The first flattener, that Friedman writes about, was the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and end of the Cold War, that brought forward the idea of a globalized world, where people from either side of the wall could collaborate for the overall economic benefit. It was around this time that Windows powered PC’s changed the way humans interacted with computers by providing a Graphical
Also, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), effective 2006 was aimed at lowering trade barriers by reducing the trade tariffs by ninety percent between Brunei, Chile, Singapore and New Zealand. People began seeing the benefits of the globalized world. The second event, Friedman claims, is the launch of the Web browser-Netscape, which got the world on the Internet. The third and the most important one was the ‘workflow software’, which he said was the “Genesis moment of the flat world”, since a series of events followed as a result of technologies that allowed work to be done collaboratively around the world. The events that form the next six flatteners included ‘Uploading’, ’Outsourcing’, ’Insourcing’, ’Offshoring’, ‘Supply-Chaining’ and ‘Informing’. The final one, which Friedman calls ‘The Steroids’, boosted this globalized work collaboration such that people were able to do anything, anywhere and anytime. These included personal digital devices, wireless access that brought mobility at super
The ‘flat’ world described by Friedman is definitely a more ‘connected world’ rather than a ‘level playing field’ since countries around the world have different political, social and economic conditions which make it rather ‘unflat’ . Richard Florida is quite right in his statement of the world being ‘spikey’ and, I would like to suggest ten ‘anti-flatteners’ or reasons that reflect the falt that we are far from being a truly flat or leveled world. The first and a very important one is ‘income inequality’. Even though people are able to collaborate and we have a global labor market, there is high wage gap at both domestic and international level.Global trade has moved the industry to developing nations, giving rise to sweatshops and child labor to drive down costs of production. Despite the efforts of organizations like Fair Factories Clearinghouse, which aim at improving workplaces for the labor class, there are many countries where it is still prevalent. The second ‘anti-flattener’ is ‘urbanization’, due to which the stress on the resources of global urban areas like New York city is increasing, leading to an imbalance of distribution of work and wages around the country as well as internationally. It also leads to problems of overcrowding of few cities. Kenichi Ohmae says we live in a “borderless world” . However, the third reason why the world is not flat is ‘borders’ and ‘war’. Even though