The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century,
the runaway bestseller by New York Times columnist Friedman has now
been on the New York Times Bestseller list for over 85 weeks and has
sold over 2 million copies in hardcover alone. Ronald Aronica and
Mtetwa Ramdoo, authors of The World is Flat? – A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times Bestseller,
point out that Friedman's book is also full of factual and
argumentative inaccuracies, some deliberate and some as a result of
living in the CEO bubble. In their book, Ramdoo and Aronica conduct a
step by step demolition of nearly all the points that Mr. Friedman
makes in his book.
Q) What prompted you to write this book? Were you primarily
motivated by wanting to straighten the record? Can you also talk a
little more about your background and how this book came about?
RA: With a 30-year career at the intersection of business and technology under my belt, I coauthored a book in 2001,
The Death of “E” and the Birth of the Real New Economy.
In that book, we described how the technology-enabled globalization of
white-collar work would be the new frontier in the world economy. The
book is about business transformation as a result of the world being
wired and the capability that the Internet provides to interconnect
business processes around the globe. It was time to prepare for a whole
new way of operating a business.
Then, in 2006, I picked up a copy of
Friedman’s book and was floored by its superficiality. But what was
more shocking to me was the fact that millions of copies had been sold,
influencing (and misinforming) leaders in business and government. Indeed, I
wanted to set the record straight, for Globalization is the greatest
reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution, and the
stories Friedman spun are but a small piece of the overall tapestry of
this monumental transformation.
Globalization is a highly complex interaction of forces. Not only does
it exhibit integration, it also exhibits disintegration. It is rooted
in cooperation—and it is rooted in violence. For some, it represents
the triumph of free-market capitalism over communism, ushering in
democracy, world peace and universal prosperity; for others, it
represents conflict, unbridled greed, deregulated corporate power, and
an utter disregard for humanity.
Yet, the person on the street, especially in America, has little clue
what globalization is all about. Few have any doubt that change is
placing the world under great stress—that it is being turned upside
down. And they may suspect that it has to do with the word,
globalization, which increasingly appears in the press and other media.
But what does it really mean? It would be great if a popularizer, a
famous personality or pundit, would explain the many political,
economic and social issues connected to the phenomenon of
globalization. Desperate for such information, millions of people,
including leaders in government and education, have turned to
Friedman’s mass market book to gain an understanding of globalization.
Unfortunately, they are served up stories about Friedman’s friends,
elite CEOs and other personal contacts.
The notion of globalization has been around for centuries, and has
taken many forms: political, economic, cultural, and technological, to
name a few. But the twenty-first century-style globalization that
Friedman writes about is unique. It has a name: “corporate”
globalization.
What we want our book to do is to go beyond Friedman’s
superficial treatment of globalization and encourage readers who were
awed by his book to “think again.”
The aim of our short monograph is to provide a counterbalance
to Friedman’s cheerleading for corporate globalization. To help readers
get a fuller understanding of the issues, we provide suggested readings
at the end of our book and at our Web site,
www.mkpress.com/flat
Globalization is so important to all of us that we need
to become more
fully informed, not misinformed by story after story based on personal
anecdotes and stories spun from meeting Friedman’s daughter’s friend’s
boyfriend at Yale, or playing golf with rich and famous corporate
executives. While readers might be unable to find a single falsehood in
Friedman’s book, neither can they find the whole truth, nor most of the
critically important facets needed for a full picture of globalization.
Q) The current way of globalization, according to you, seems like a
race to the bottom. It seems like a system largely driven by large
corporations and their obsession with lowering the cost of production.
Let me juxtapose this thought with something which is oft mentioned –
that success of US from the 1950's onwards was largely buttressed by
robust middle class with decent disposable incomes. My question to you
is that is there a chance that the vanishing middle class will
translate into a vanishing consumer, and what will that mean for the
whole enterprise?
MR: That’s a very good question, for it touches on some of the
more profound aspects of twenty-first–century style globalization. We
have a whole section in our book, “America’s Former Middle Class” that
talks about the plight of the American middle class. Three pillars:
land (material resources); labor; and capital form the foundation of
industrial economies. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution,
Dickensonian industrialists (robber barons) kept labor down when it came to any stake
in wealth. Then, in 1901, Republican Teddy Roosevelt became President.
He distrusted wealthy businessmen and, as a Trust Buster, dissolved 40
monopolistic corporations. His Square Deal promised a fair shake for
the average citizen, including regulation of railroad rates, and pure
foods and drugs. As an outdoorsman, he promoted the conservation
movement, emphasizing efficient use of natural resources. After 1906,
he attacked big business and suggested that the courts were biased
against labor unions. In short, you might say Roosevelt gave birth
today’s American middle class. Recognizing the capitalists’ excesses
during the Industrial Revolution, leaders, such as Roosevelt, reigned
in raw capitalism and created a “mixed economy,” not the pure
laissez-faire form of capitalism advocated by the Dickensonians.
Fast forwarding to today, free-market Friedman seems to assert that
now, with his utopian, digitally connected flat world, even the
nation-state could wane as flat-world capitalism creates, in the words
of Marx and Engels, “a world after its own image.”
Henry Ford was a pioneer of “welfare capitalism” designed to
improve the lot of his workers and especially to reduce the heavy
turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men a year to fill 100
slots. Efficiency meant hiring and keeping the best workers. In January
1914, Ford announced his five-dollar a day program. The revolutionary
program called for a reduction in length of the workday from 9 to 8
hours, a 5-day work week, and a raise in minimum daily pay from $2.34
to $5 for qualifying workers.
Wall Street criticized Ford for starting the 40-hour work week
and the minimum wage, but he showed that by paying his people more,
Ford workers would be able to afford the cars they were producing—which, in
turn,
would be good for the economy. Ford labeled the increased compensation
profit-sharing rather than wages.
With today’s corporate globalization, we are seeing a return to
Dickensonian capitalism on a grand scale. Not only do we need a strong
American middle class, we need a strong Global Middle Class, not a
global 3rd world that is seeing America's middle class heading toward 3rd world
status. We need a new Teddy Roosevelt and thinking capitalists in the
likes of upstart Henry Ford if the world is to avoid Wall Street’s rule
and its preeminent goal of only increasing shareholder value.
Q) You raise multiple points in your book illustrating ways in which
the world is not particularly “flat”. If I read you right, you are not
against “flat world” but a Friedman conception of a neo-liberal “flat
world” that exists today. Tell us a little more about your thoughts the
current “flat” world and the kind of “flat” world that you would like
to see. In other words, how does the current global economic regime
look like and what would you like to see changed?
RA: Neo-liberals believe that free markets, free trade, and the
free flow of capital are the most efficient ways to produce the
greatest social, political, and economic good. They argue for reduced
taxation, reduced regulation, and minimal government involvement in the
economy. They include privatizing health and retirement benefits,
dismantling of trade unions, and generally opening our economy to
foreign competition. Detractors see neo-liberalism as a power grab by
economic elites and as a race to the bottom for everyone else.
The current economic regime unleashes neoliberalism. Agriculture,
indigenous peoples’ resources, water, genes, medicines—increasingly,
they are all being privatized and placed in the hands of transnational
corporations. The field of economics has always addressed both private
and public goods. But today’s neoliberal philosophy views all goods as
private goods—perhaps even our laws are becoming private goods.
Corporations no longer influence our laws—now, they write them!
Multinationals, working behind closed doors are writing the world’s
economic/trade agreements unfettered by any one nation’s interests and
unaccountable to individual nations’ citizens. For example, the WTO,
which emerged from GATT which covered international trade and tariffs,
is an organization that protects multinationals. And Chapter 11 of the
supposed free-trade agreement of NAFTA, establishes a new system of
private arbitration for foreign investors to bring injury claims
against governments. The operative principle is that foreign capital
investing in Canada, Mexico or the United States may demand
compensation if the profit-making potential of their ventures are
injured by government decisions. This gives foreign-based companies
more rights than domestic businesses operating in their home
country have. Global corporations are free to litigate on their own without
having to ask national governments to act on their behalf in global
forums. The national identity of multinationals will become less and
less relevant, since they have status to challenge governments. NAFTA
creates, as Lydia Lazar, a Chicago attorney, puts it, “an open class of
legal equals.” She adds that “NAFTA is really an end run around the
Constitution.”
What we’d like to see changed is the form of governance needed
for global trade. Current forums and trade agreements (WTO, World Bank,
IMF, NAFTA, CAFTA) have stripped many nation-states—hence, their
people—of their former roles governing trade. Not doing this, indeed,
could lead to the scenarios described in Harvard’s David Korten’s book,
When Corporations Rule the World.
Because globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since
the Industrial Revolution, there’s no pat checklist to instantly change
policy and strategy. We’re talking about a multi-year struggle for
individuals, companies and nations to adjust and readjust. Although we
do not in any way provide cookie cutter solutions in our book, we
enumerate many of the issues that must be addressed. Here are some
examples: 1. Reform of the dependence on Treasury securities, which
funds U. S. over-consumption with borrowed dollars from China, Japan
and other export driven nations. 2. Reform the IMF, World Bank, and WTO
to make their decision-making more transparent. 3. Provide education
subsidies, not farm subsidies in the U.S. and Europe 4. Establish
worldwide regulation that would restrict continuing damage to the
environment and maintain biodiversity. 5. Have government once again
govern corporations versus the reverse as it is today (e.g. put trade
policy back into Congress, not in trade agreements written behind
closed doors). 6. Establish a U.S. Federal Competitiveness cabinet
position. 7. Break the bribery cycle between poor countries’
governments and international companies. 8. Establish tripolar trading
blocs, not American unipolar hegemony (e.g. establish true economic
unions, not asymmetric trade agreements). 9. Separate public goods (the
commons) from private goods. 10. Foster. increased savings (e.g., with
automatic 401K plans). 11. Develop energy policies and strategies that
will break our dependency on oil (e.g. rethink and reorganize America’s
sprawling suburbs (exurbs)). 13.Globalize health care, e.g., allow
people to spend Medicare dollars overseas (Mexico would boom, solving
much of the illegal immigration problem in the U.S.). We are well
overdue for a wakeup call to address these and other issues. And an
open debate could just lead to peoples’ active engagement in creating a
just, sustainable, economic world.
Q) You spend a fair amount of time on describing the underbelly of
the beast – the 998 million Indians with no access to Internet, the
farmers coming suicide there, or the laid off workers in Detroit. The
global middle class and under class are suffering. But certainly the
number of Chinese below poverty line has taken a dramatic nose dive in
the past two decades. It also seems clear to me that the 9% growth
rates in India are benefiting some poor. Certainly the story of
globalization is not all doom and gloom. Tell us about the cross
cutting forces at work in globalization today.
MR: Today, leading economists, both advocates and critics of
globalization, agree that international trade has improved the lives of
many across the world, bringing technology and knowledge to virtually
every corner of the globe, and has raised many above the tyranny of
backward and often repressive cultures. No doubt volumes could be
filled with success stories of international trade. It’s “corporate
globalization” that’s at issue in the 21st century. Neoliberal
free-trade proponents too often frame the issues in a polarizing way:
“free-trade (good)” versus “protectionism (bad).” “Your are
either for us, or against us,” they might say, adding that “Free-trade reduces
poverty, protectionism creates poverty.” Of course, this is bullshit.
Globalization is not a bipolar issue, while the case can be made that
“corporate globalization” is.
Defining poverty is key to any discussion of the so-called poverty
lines. Is economic globalization the only form of globalization? Should
some goods be off limits to corporate globalization and, if so, which
ones? To answer these questions, we’ve included a large section in the
book devoted to the concept of the Privatization of the Commons. We
quote Indian ecologist Dr.Vandana Shiva, “People do not die for lack of
incomes. They die for lack of access to resources. Here too Jeffrey
Sacks (The End of Poverty) is wrong when he says, ‘In a world of
plenty, 1 billion people are so poor, their lives are in danger.’ The
indigenous people in the Amazon, the mountain communities in the
Himalaya, peasants whose land has not been appropriated and whose water
and biodiversity has not been destroyed by debt-creating industrial
agriculture are ecologically rich, even though they do not earn a
dollar a day. On the other hand, even at five dollars a day, people are
poor if they have to buy their basic needs at high prices. Indian
peasants who have been made poor and pushed into debt over the past
decade to create markets for costly seeds and agrochemicals through
economic globalization are ending their lives in thousands.”
After China announced plans to adopt a new law that seeks to
crack down on sweatshops and protect workers' rights by giving labor
unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces
in the 1980s, guess who started lobbying the Chinese politicians? As
David Baboza reported in the New York Times, “The move, which
underscores the government's growing concern about the widening income
gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American
corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may
build fewer factories here. The workers’ advocates say that the
proposed labor rules—and more important, enforcement powers—are long
overdue, and they accuse the American businesses of favoring a system
that has led to widespread labor abuse.” “You have big corporations
opposing basically modest reforms,” said Tim Costello, an official of
the Global Labor Strategies and a longtime labor union advocate. “This
flies in the face of the idea that globalization and corporations will
raise standards around the world.”
What's currently going on is called “corporate globalization,” where
powerful transnational corporations, backed by supposed “free trade”
treaties penned by corporate lobbyists in Washington, go to the ends of
the earth to exploit slave-like labor. No one of us wants continuing
poverty in China, India, or elsewhere. But is making $2.00 a day (the
oft quoted dollar amount to be “out of poverty”) the goal, the only
goal?
Out of Poverty?
Life in rural communities in China, India and elsewhere is tough. Are
we to displace a non-money economy with formerly self-sufficient
peoples moving to the mega cities to live in slums? In the recent PBS
documentary, “China From the Inside,” rural people dislocated due to
the damming of rivers were given new high density housing. But as one
of them exclaimed, we have no jobs and cannot raise our food anymore.
Relocation from dam areas, like the Three Gorges, is causing huge
social upheaval (75,000 riots in China in 2005). Thousands of families
are divided throughout China as parents spend most of the year in large
cities making a living, while their children remain in rural villages,
with grandma tending to all the chores and to the fields. In other
cases, women are left in the villages to raise children while husbands
go off alone to the cities to work. Expectant mothers still abort
female fetuses or abandon newborn girls because of the long-held view
that women are not as valuable to the culture as men. China is the only
nation in the world where the suicide rate for women is higher than
that for men. Of course, relocated peasants cannot afford the shoe
strings on the brand-named shoes they manufacture in sweatshops. But
then, again, they do get to see their children for a whopping 4 days out of the year!
So yes, they are “out of poverty” according to the $2.00 a day rule,
but at what cost? Is there hope for a Global Middle Class? Why, when
the Chinese Communist Party’s latest five-year plan called for
increased focus on unions, did multinationals threaten to relocate jobs
to Viet Nam or other dirt-cheap–labor countries?
China is run by the Communist Party, which bases its legitimacy on
delivering both stability and the conditions for prosperity. But
stability is under threat as the economic boom strands millions at the
margins. Meanwhile, rampant corruption is sapping people's trust in the
Party. Officials are seen, increasingly, not as public servants but as
profiteers. Is China Corporate Globalization’s 21st century poster
child where the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer in social as
well as monetary terms? We don’t have the answers in our book, but we
identify the essential questions, such as, Is earning $2.00 a day the
end of poverty? You’ll see little discussion of these matters in
Friedman.
Q) Thomas Friedman in his book, “The World is Flat: A brief history
of the 21st Century” quotes Bill Gates, “Thirty years ago, if you had a
choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or
Shanghai or being born an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would
take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent
life there, even with average talent, were much greater. But as the
world has gone flat, and so many people can plug and play from
anywhere, natural talent has started to trump geography.” It seems to
me Bill Gates is comparing a child born to fairly rich educated parents
near Bombay or Shanghai given only a tiny fraction (about 1% in India)
of people in India and China have access to “plug and play”, something
which you point out in your book. Even if we agree with Mr. Gates, we
still miss the close to 95% of population with its share of geniuses
that don't live close to Mumbai and Shanghai. Can you shed some light
on their chances for “success” or integration in the global economy?
MR: What Gates and Friedman are discussing are the opportunities
for the elite. Friedman writes, “I cannot tell any other society or
culture what to say to its own children, but I can tell you what I say
to my own: The world is being flattened. I didn’t start it and you
can’t stop it, except at a great cost to human development and your own
future. But we can manage it, for better or for worse. You can flourish
in this flat world, but it does take the right imagination and the
right motivation. While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11,
the world needs you to be forever the generation of 11/9 [the fall of
the Berlin wall]—the generation of strategic optimists, the generation
with more dreams than memories, the generation that wakes up each
morning and not only imagines that things can be better but also acts
on that imagination every day.”
While these lessons
display concern for his children, he leaves it up to their imagination
as to the way forward. Of course, his daughter attends Yale, and there
Friedman found more insights for planning our futures while munching
pizza, “In October 2005, my wife and I went up to New Haven to attend
parents’ weekend at Yale. We went out for a pizza lunch with our
daughter and her roommates, and one roommate’s boyfriend. I sat across
from the boyfriend, Eric Stern, who was getting a PhD from Yale in
biomedical engineering, with an expertise in nanotechnology. Eric is
precisely the sort of young person we want the America education system
to keep churning out.”
Eric’s father is a medical doctor and a science professor at Columbia.
If only every kid in America had Eric’s background and advantages and
could graduate from Yale, all would be well in the Kingdom of Flat. All
they need is a wealthy daddy, a degree from U.S.-President-producing
Yale, and we are off to the races. But for those of us whose children do
not breathe rarified air, Freidman tells ouir children to use their
imaginations.
Ditto for our children that don’t breathe such rarefied air
in Chindia (China and India). The haves and have nots are growing
further apart across the globe, in rich countries and poor. But, as
Indian entrapeneur, Rajesh Jain, points out in the foreword to the book,
Extreme Competition, in India there is great hope across the land. Just
take microbanking. Bangladeshi Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad
Yunus were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 for their efforts to
create economic and social development from below. Indeed, there is a
fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, but few multinationals seem to
notice. While most IT activity is focused on urban centers such as
Bangalore, Jain’s Netcore is producing the $100 PC for the next billion.
So, the big hope for addressing poverty isn’t about the “zippies” in
Bangalore that Friedman writes about, it’s about the bottom of the
pyramid. And when innovations happen there, entrepreneurs in Chindia
(China and India) will take them global at Chindia prices —it’s called
blowback (e.g. Tata's $2,200 car), and its being driven at the bottom of
the pyramid, and not in the chrome and rosewood halls of the WTO or
World Bank or Wall Street.
Q) Friedman has all sorts of suggestions for parents living in suburbs
like Poughkeepsie. What would you like to say to the parents of young
kids across America – Is it to vote to change the economic and social
policy of the government?
MR: Americans are just beginning to think about what can happen
as early as 2010. Some forecasts show that, with an average growth rate
of 8–10%, China’s GDP will, by 2010, have surpassed Japan’s. By 2030,
China will have the world’s largest economy, and, by 2050, it could be
double that of the U.S.
Meanwhile, Washington leaves industrial policy up to the “free
market”—or, as we write in our book, Washington has no industrial
policy, which is perhaps the real issue—America does not have a
national industrial policy that identifies and strengthens the
industries in which it wants to be the master in the twenty-first
century. America’s economic policies are, by and large, set by
transnational corporations who wield excessive power in Washington.
Their interests are not in America, but are in their stockholders. As
more than one CEO has said, their interests may indeed lie outside of
the United Sates. So, keeping this in mind, Friedman’s thesis could
translate into “Go East, young man. Get your engineering degree, and
move to Bangalore, because that’s where your job is going.”
For starters, I’d tell
parents to read Sen. Byron Dorgan’s book, Take this Job and Ship It: How
Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America. It’s a
real eye opener. Then visit his Web site (http://dorgan.senate.gov) to
see the kind of legislation that’s needed to put America’s industrial
policy on track: 1. Antisweatshop legislation--barring imports produced
under internationally defined "sweatshop" conditions and holding
companies accountable for using forced labor or denying basic human
rights to workers, including the right to organize. 2. Free riders
legislation--repealing tax incentives for American companies that enjoy
all the benefits of being "American" (government services and subsidies,
the protection of the US military) while discarding reciprocal
obligations to the country: jobs, economic investment and paying a fair
share of the tax burden. 3. Legislation to Cap trade deficits--stopping
the $800 billion a year hemorrhaging. These bills don't deal with every
disorder of globalization, but they just could jump-start a debate that
Congress has long avoided. And these bills are not about
“protectionism.” Instead they are about America formulating an
industrial trade policy, because as, as former Reagan commerce advisor
Clyde Prestowitz clearly pointed out in his book, Three Billion New
Capitalists, China and India have very clear national industrial
policies. America does not.
Q) You bring out a variety of points that dismantle nearly all of
arguments that Friedman makes in the book. What, according to you, did
Friedman get right in his book? What does he get about global economic
regime?
RA: The main thing Friedman got right was that there is a need
for a book on globalization that can reach the general population.
Unfortunately, his book misinforms the public. We could not find a
single falsehood in Friedman’s book. What he wrote, he mostly got
right (it's hard to get "stories" wrong). But it’s what he didn’t write—it’s what he left out—that makes
the book so problematic. There’s little more in his book beyond being a
cheerleader for unfettered corporate globalization. And it's important
to recognize that, in some sense, this globalization stuff he writes
about really does seem to work [sarcasm intended] ... for example, if you consider that if four average
blue-collar Americans join Friedman at a bar, the five of them, on
average, would be millionaires. As some of our politicians
like to remind us, America is the economic envy of the world, and
similar statistics to the bar scenario prove them right. That’s right,
eh? We are all profiting from a record high stock market, right?
Q) Thomas Friedman started of as a successful Middle-East pundit,
something for which he has actually received training. It is at best a
strange transition from being a Middle-East pundit to being an “expert”
on globalization. Do Friedman's flaws in his economic analysis, as
pointed out by you and numerous other scholars, emanate primarily from
his lack of intellectual training in economics or his lack of
intellectual honesty or is it something else entirely?
MR: It seems Friedman is an opportunist. Remember, he started on
his globalization quest when he was on assignment for the Discovery
Channel doing “The Other Side of Outsourcing.” It seems to have
occurred to him during that assignment, “Aha. A book!” You’ll see that
he based many of the stories in his book on the Discovery documentary.
Being a well-placed smart person, Friedman did what any capitalist
would do, he used his celebrity assets to make money. And to him, we
say kudos. Stiglitz, Bagwhati, Roach, Leamer and other well-respected,
fully-qualified economists and business analysts can write their hearts
out, but who will read them? Celebrity has its privileges.
What’s unnerving is not Friedman, but the overwhelming traction
of his book. This is best explained by Professor Roberto Gonzalez,
“Ultimately, Friedman’s work is little more than advertising. The goal
is not to sell the high-tech gadgetry described in page after page of
the book, but to sell a way of life—a world view glorifying corporate
capitalism and mass consumption as the only paths to progress. It is a
view intolerant of lives lived outside the global marketplace. It
betrays [unconsciously reveals] a disregard for democracy and a
profound lack of imagination. This book’s lighthearted style might be
amusing were it not for the fact that his subject—the global economy—is
a matter of life and death for millions. Friedman’s words and opinions,
ill informed as they are, shape the policies of leaders around the
world. Many consider him to be a sophisticated thinker and analyst—not
a propagandist. It is a sobering reminder of the intellectual paralysis
gripping our society today.” Today we don’t play sports; we sit on the
couch and play our sports vicariously through celebrity sports stars.
Today, we don’t have much time to think; we let our celebrity pundits
do that for us.
Q) You heavily rely on paraphrasing and quotations from others authors
to put forth your case. Was that a conscious decision or was it
strictly a result of time pressures?
RA: We’ll give you yet another quote to tell why! Here is Bill
Moyers at the 2007 National Conference on Media Reform, “The degree to
which this [free trade] has become a purely ideological debate, devoid
of any factual basis that people can weigh the gains and losses is
reflected in Thomas Friedman's astonishing claim, stated not long ago
in a television interview, that he endorsed the Central American Free
Trade Agreement (CAFTA) without even reading it. That is simply because
it stood for ‘free trade.’ We have reached the stage when the Poo-bahs
of punditry have only to declare that ‘the world is flat,’ for everyone
to agree it is, without going to the edge and looking over themselves.
It's called reporting.”
And that’s exactly what we want to accomplish with our book, going to
the edge and doing some “reporting” on what those qualified to analyze
and report on 21st century globalization have to say.
We have 46 footnote
references on our sources of information. Friedman has zero. We don’t
tell cute stories about zippies, friends and
elite CEOs. And we explore nine critical issues Friedman ignores or
glosses over, along with an enumeration of 22 action items. Our book
would be hundreds more pages if we expounded on each of these
strategies and their rationales. We meant only to set the record
straight on what Friedman is saying by providing the views of the
experts, and then to provide the reader with a roadmap for exploring
this vital subject further, for globalization affects all our lives and
will be of even greater significance to our children and grandchildren.
Simply stated, we all must learn about globalization and our available
choices as we define our place in a global economy. Thus, we hope our analysis of Friedman’s book provides readers who were awed
by his 600 pages of bafflegab with a second take on the monumental
subject of globalization.
To help our readers to develop their understanding of the issues, we
have a shortlist of suggested readings and a comprehensive and growing
resource list at
www.mkpress.com/flat
Our message is “Wake up!”
It’s past time to come to grips with the greatest reorganization of the
world since the Industrial Revolution, and you cannot "outsource" your
thinking on this subject to celebrity pundits.
Q) Friedman is often accused of writing newspaper plain speak,
speaking in clichés and in analogies but avoiding facts and avoiding
substance to story telling. The idea is, according to Friedman, to be a
translator of the economic jargon and make it accessible to the public.
Is there any merit in this idea? Are economic facts about the current
global regime so complex?
RA: A translator of economic jargon would be great. We open our
book saying that the person on the street, especially in America, has
little clue what globalization is all about. But few have any doubt
that change is placing the world under great stress, that it is being
“turned upside down.” And the person on the street may suspect that it
has to do with the word, which increasingly appears in the press and
other media: globalization. But what does it really mean? It would be
great if a popularizer, a famous personality or pundit, would explain
the many complicated political, economic and social issues connected to
the phenomenon of globalization. Walter Cronkite or Bill Moyers could
probably do that.
Desperate for such information, millions of people, including leaders
in business, government and education, have turned to Friedman’s mass
market book to gain an understanding of globalization. Unfortunately,
they are served up stories from friends, CEOs and other personal
contacts of the author. These stories are not harmless, for they become
solemn writ for lawmakers and opinion mongers.
It’s not so complex to explain that multinational corporations,
are by their very nature, aimed at maximizing shareholder value. To
achieve this corporate goal, multinational corporations are literally
going to the ends of the earth in search of dirt-cheap labor for both
manufacturing and high-end knowledge-based workers. IBM recently laid
off 15,000 employees in America, while hiring 45,000 in India. There is
nothing complex about that idea.
But shipping jobs overseas and hollowing out America’s middle class is
only part of the picture. America is exporting its pollution by
relocating manufacturing facilities to countries where environment laws
are lax or non-existent. Let’s not forget about the human abuses
lurking behind famous brand names and companies. Charles Kernaghan of
the National Labor Committee cites Wal-Mart among others as repeat
offenders. Friedman has nothing but awe for Wal-Mart’s supply chaining,
failing all mention of Wal-Mart’s darker side cited by Kernaghan. Like
other US retailers, Wal-Mart claims to be enforcing decent labor
conditions, but investigators find otherwise. Kernaghan points out that
the same companies have won enforceable rules in trade agreements to
protect their trademarks, labels and copyrights, yet regard protections
for workers as “an impediment to free trade.” “Under this distorted
sense of values,” says Kernaghan, “the label is protected but not the
human being, the worker who makes the product.”
What’s so hard for the laymen to understand about that?
Plain newspaper
speak is great if it conveys substance. Friedman is especially
destructive when he opines on public matters outside his supposed
expertise. His thinking seems to be anchored by Ayn Rand's social
philosophy: Let the strong prevail, let the weak pay for their
weakness. There is no doubt that many of those who read Friedman are
now convinced the world is flat (perhaps they also believe the moon is
made of green cheese). But newspaper plain talk doesn't make it so.
Having paid the price of wading through Friedman’s almost 600 pages of
grandiloquent prose and bafflegab, there are those who want to protect
that investment by clinging to the idea that they have gained a full
understanding of globalization. Albert Einstein once wrote, “Everything
should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Friedman’s
simplistic treatise on globalization fails that test.
While Friedman’s personal anecdotes fascinate many readers and
make for good tales at cocktail parties, it’s what’s left out of story
after story after story that makes the book such a flawed distillation
of globalization. Thus, it is what’s ignored on the many issues that
Friedman touches upon that makes the book dangerous, for it gives
average readers a false sense that they are gaining a true
understanding of this broad and complex subject, globalization.