BOOKENDS: Friedman & Co. Party Like It's 1491

By Thomas L. Friedman

April 2005

$27.50

Denying that young, upwardly mobile Chinese resent working for Japanese corporations, the mayor of Dalian, China, says to Thomas L. Friedman: “When it comes to the field of economy, we only focus on the economic problems.”

Of course, the mayor isn’t exactly right, as anti-Japanese riots erupted in China last month. Organized largely by technologically savvy young people, the protests reflect the intersection of cultural history, geopolitics, and international trade. Anger at textbooks sanitizing Japanese war crimes and at Tokyo’s campaign for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council spur violent looting that targets Japanese businesses and products.

Concurring with the mayor, Friedman argues in his new book “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century” that Japanese outsourcing to China will likely foster conciliation between the two countries. At least in the short term, this appears an unfortunate prognostication.

Friedman and the mayor, it seems, both ensnare themselves in exceedingly sunny optimism by limiting their focus one-dimensionally to economics. Though many theorists recognize globalization as at least partially a political and cultural phenomenon, Friedman devotes the vast majority of “The World Is Flat” to business, corporate management, and technological innovation.

In doing so, he departs somewhat from his past work on the subject and from his geopolitical expertise. Friedman may be best known on campus for his role as a guest lecturer this semester in Social Analysis 78, “Globalization and Its Critics,” co-taught by University President Lawrence H. Summers and Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel (who is—incidentally—Friedman’s college friend from their years as undergrads at Brandeis). In the wider world, Friedman is a high-profile New York Times columnist and a trained scholar on Middle East affairs. He established himself as the leading popular commentator on globalization with his 1999 work “The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” which deservedly garnered acclaim for its accessible synthesis of globalization’s diverse effects and far-reaching possibilities. But “The World Is Flat” lacks its predecessor’s conceptual breadth and incisive exposition. The book often amuses and sometimes amazes, but the basic argument—that more individuals of different backgrounds can access global networks of competition and cooperation than ever before—is rendered opaque by inelegantly colloquial formulations of critical ideas and technocratic by its overemphasis on business.

Friedman continues the informal mode of popular scholarship that earned him acclaim. Exclamation marks are everywhere, and Friedman coins several clever and useful monikers. “Developing Countries Anonymous,” for instance, expresses the need for underdeveloped countries to engage in self-reflection, openly avow their lack of development, and then consciously choose to fix it. He also intersperses personal accounts of minor technological enlightenment—realizing that he can print his boarding pass at home, for instance—that provide a welcome air of self-deprecation to countervail the author’s reverence for his own “Columbus-like” trip to India.

The popular style sometimes goes too far, however. Friedman tends to externalize his internal monologue as he travels the non-Western world. His thoughts unfortunately include aw-shucks American bemusement with those Asians and their technology: Wow, bullet trains have wireless, but I can’t get good cell phone service in Bethesda!

More important, Friedman’s insistence upon pithy labels for the book’s central analytic concepts makes the ideas less understandable. He offers an involved theory of how the current form of globalization, with its level playing field and widely accessible avenues for international commercial competition, arose. Ten “flatteners,” the story goes, constitute the forces primarily responsible for leveling the playing field. Most of these are business practices defined in the peculiar language of management consultants—outsourcing, insourcing, open-sourcing, supply-chaining—but the list also includes the fall of the Berlin Wall and Netscape’s initial public offering, which Friedman may credit too effusively for initiating the 1990s tech economy. Though these factors seem somewhat arbitrarily chosen, their explications are enlightening. For instance, Friedman explains UPS’s fascinating role, referenced knowingly but indecipherably in the company’s television commercials, in “synchronizing global supply chains,” which requires the shipping company to fix broken computers in the name of Toshiba and fill online shoe orders in Nike’s stead. Friedman’s argument, thus far, is well-taken.

The complication and opacity ensues when Friedman discusses the process by which these forces shape the world: the fantastically muddled “triple convergence.” First, around the year 2000, the ten flatteners “started to converge and work together,” increasing global access to networks of collaboration and competition and giving rise to new business practices that sought to exploit the change. Second, the “new playing field for doing business” converged with the business practices themselves. Third, the populations of China, India, and the former USSR, granted their economic liberation, “walked out on to the playing field” and, presumably, converged with it.

But “converge” is an inadequate, and indeed somewhat meaningless, descriptor for this rich story. Are the factors that participate in the triple convergence mutually reinforcing? Is the relationship among them linear and causal? How does the fall of the Berlin Wall, a singular historical event in 1989, “converge” with open-sourcing in 2000?

A still more problematic colloquial concept than the “triple convergence” is the book’s central theme itself. What, exactly, constitutes a flat world? Surely it entails a “level playing field.” And yes, many young Indians participate in outsourcing and function vitally in the global economy, but they are hardly on a par with the American executive who made the decision to outsource in the first place. Commendably, in a section that deals fairly and extensively with critics of globalization and with disputants of his claims of equality, Friedman recognizes this question. He asserts that “the world is not flat” and explains the title as literary license intended to draw attention to the issue—but this mea culpa does not arrive until page 375. The concession’s offhand placement in the denouement of the argument, rather than in the prelude to it, can only confuse the reader compelled by Friedman’s effervescent faith in flatness for the previous 374.

In order to determine whether globalization has flattened the world, of course, one must begin with a coherent conception of globalization itself. Friedman’s leans excessively on economics at the expense of sociopolitical and moral concerns, as his exchange in the book with Sandel illustrates.

In an extended direct quotation that is among the book’s many illuminating moments, Sandel cautions Friedman: “A flat, frictionless world is a mixed blessing. It may, as you suggest, be good for global business. Or it may, as Marx believed, augur well for a proletarian revolution. But it may also pose a threat to the distinctive places and communities that give us our bearings, that locate us in the world. … Some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride.”

Friedman’s rejoinder is that, from an American perspective, one can legitimately perceive outsourcing as exploitation of cheap foreign labor but that the flat world may require trading one person’s unemployment for another’s economic liberation. But, confined so closely to his economic mode of analysis, Friedman has replied to a vastly different trade-off than the one Sandel posited. The critical issue is not merely to whom economic benefit is allocated at whose expense, but also to what extent it should be pursued at all in the face of competing claims.

To his credit, Friedman moves on to discuss briefly the depersonalization that a frictionless, expansive, highly technical–i.e., “flat”–world may impose. He risks triviality, however, by steeping the discussion in Americana, evoking Willy Loman and citing a real-life struggling Minnesota wholesaler. Friedman’s pal the wholesaler may have a legitimate complaint that he can no longer “stop by the office, give the buyers a few Vikings’ tickets,” and maintain a friendly rapport with his customers. But the wholesaler’s grievance seems frivolous compared to the sense of disillusionment and dislocation felt by citizens of the developing world who see traditional culture eroded by globalization.

Here Friedman’s effort to link his analysis to American popular culture seems like a stretch; later it becomes downright offensive. He writes: “Bin Laden is to the Arab masses what O.J. was to many American blacks—the stick they poke in the eye of an ‘unfair’ America and their leaders.”

Perhaps we can acquit Friedman for this sentence that doesn’t fit. But we cannot let him off the hook for his more serious transgression of reducing globalization to business. In totality, “The World is Flat” is an amusing demystification of multinational corporations and consultant-speak. But it falls short of a forceful theory of a new age characterized by the equal access of diverse populations to the global economy. In the end, if the world truly is flat—whatever that really means—then its two dimensions are one more than Friedman’s analysis possesses.

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Meatless

Friedman recounts a conversation with friend Ken Greer, who runs a small media company being squeezed by competition from larger advertising firms. The passage illustrates one of the most frequent criticisms of Friedman’s writing—that he privileges cute anecdotes over meaty analysis:

“Ken said something that really hit home with me: ‘It’s like they have cut all the fat out of the business’ and turned everything into a numbers game. ‘But fat is what gives meat its taste...The leanest cuts of meat don’t taste very good. You want it marbled with at least a little fat.’ The flattening process relentlessly trims the fat out of business and life....”