The World Is Flat, Part II

Overall, I liked the second half of The World Is Flat much better than the first. Having established the factors flattening the world, Friedman turns his attention to America’s chances for success and what we can do to improve them. He also examines how the same technological innovations can empower individuals who want to create a better future via political activism or entrepreneurship and those who want to destroy the modern institutions they envy and fear in order to pull the world back into a simpler, more glorious past. More importantly for me, he describes the downsides of at least some of the great flatteners and their likely impacts on society.

I thought that Friedman did a great job of identifying the gaps in America’s education, infrastructure, and ambitions that threaten our future success in a flattening world, although his proposed solutions are not as clearly laid out. For example, he describes how our system of funding public education via local property taxes might have made sense when our society needed a combination of unskilled laborers and educated professionals, but no longer works when decent wages require a very high standard of education (p. 360). Friedman advocates making benefits and education as flexible as possible to encourage upward employment mobility (p. 383) and suggests that compulsory and/or subsidized tertiary education may be required (p. 387), although it is unclear how this would be funded given that pesky problem with public education mentioned above. He also points out the relative success of many immigrants’ children and the importance of high expectations and two-parent homes (p. 396). What he fails to acknowledge is that having one parent or other caregiving relative at home to supervise and encourage children is much more difficult in our mobile modern society, in which both parents often work to make ends meet and there is much less support from the extended family. Friedman criticizes the welfare system (p. 391) without acknowledging that parenting one’s children is as important to a society as performing paid work, and hardly mentions the critical issues of flextime, parental leave, and the costs (financial and emotional) of “outsourcing” childcare.

I appreciated Friedman’s discussion about the importance of the internet in shaping society as well as its potential pitfalls. He suggests that for all China’s resources, its government’s use of censorship impedes the imagination, idea sharing, and (presumably) achievement that accompany the world of information potentially accessible online (p. 449). On the other hand, Friedman makes the important point that the transparency allowed by the internet means fewer second chances, so young people had best take care of their reputations now that prospective admissions committees and employers can get to know them through their MySpace accounts and other online records (p. 529). (I myself have tried hard to keep my personal information from becoming publicly available, but recently was shocked to discover that my name, employer, and home address were listed on a Huffington Post website along with the amount I donated to a presidential campaign.) Friedman also describes the danger of the “echo effect” that can occur when like-minded individuals self-associate online, reinforcing each other’s ideas without dissenting (perhaps saner and/or better informed) voices (p. 526).

I liked Friedman’s point that participation in a global supply chain provides a strong incentive for peaceful relations and political stability, a.k.a. the Dell theory (p. 587). He could have elaborated further on the idea that since financial dependence on the exchange of goods, ideas, and services with other nations provides such incentives more generally, the US and other democratic world powers should try to engage rogue nations through trade, diplomacy, and media. Imposing embargoes only serves to isolate those nations further, allowing despots to cultivate fear of the unknown Other to retain popularity/power and impeding the filtration of modernizing influences and inspirational counterexamples that could help those they rule to envision and demand alternatives. He does acknowledge that outsiders should collaborate with progressive forces of the Arab-Muslim world by, for example, signing free trade agreements, to foster a war of ideas within their civilization that could result in true empowerment (p. 569).

Finally, Friedman finally acknowledges the devastating impact that population growth coupled with increased standards of living will have on the environment (p. 570). However, for an expert in the Middle East, Friedman seems quite unrealistic regarding the important issue of oil, particularly with respect to its abundance and its ecological impacts. I did appreciate his point that China’s foreign policy focuses on access to oil, causing them to collaborate with, for example, the Sudanese government despite the genocide being perpetrated in Darfur (p. 574). As Friedman states much later, despotic leaders will not reform as long as they can use oil revenue to fund their regimes. But rather than criticizing the US for cozying up to the fundamentalist Saudi Arabians, who supply the madrassas that created the Taliban as well as zealous al-Qaeda recruits, Friedman advises us to work with our allies to bring down the cost of crude oil (p. 628). A fine idea, but how exactly is that to be accomplished given the ever-growing demand from developing nations like China in combination with a finite, perhaps dwindling, supply? He states that “one thing we will not be able to do is tell young Indians, Russians, Poles, or Chinese that… they have to hold back and consume less for the greater global good” (p. 575). But that is precisely what we must do if we are to have any hope of preventing global warming catastrophe, albeit in combination with the willingness to lead by example ourselves.