The World Is Flat is an updated report from the field. Whatever one thinks of Friedman as an analyst (and I'd say there's only one possible opinion of him as a prose stylist), he's an energetic reporter and a good storyteller. His new book teems with interesting anecdotes about innovative companies, technologies and business processes. Everyone's heard by now of the book's opening gambit: his wide-eyed tour of the call centers of Bangalore, India, where adolescents re-christened "Derek" and "Daisy" practice saying "Thirty little turtles in a bottle of bottled water" in order to communicate with Americans frantic about lost luggage or frozen computers. There's also a brief history of open-sourcing: of how Linux and Apache grew, on virtually pure anarchist principles, to become the backbone of the Internet. In counterpoint, one learns how Wal-Mart (of whose principles there's no need to speak) conquered the world by becoming "the best supply chain operator of all time," in the words of an awed business consultant.

Supply-chaining is one of the world-flattening forces that are kicking globalization up to another level. Outsourcing, offshoring, work-flow software, digitization--every new organizational and technological development tends to divide, isolate, simplify and cheapen the production process. An old friend of Friedman's used to be an illustrator. Now, thanks to design programs like Quark and Photoshop, he's JAFA (Just Another Fucking Artist). His skills have become "vanilla"--Friedmanese for expendable, a mere commodity--so he has "transformed himself into an ideas consultant," supplying drawing concepts that are outsourced for production. This is the fate of a good half the characters who crowd Friedman's book. While unassumingly making a living, they are overtaken by labor-saving technology and turned into inexpensive vanilla ice cream. Fortunately, they somehow manage to reinvent themselves as a pricier "chocolate sauce" or "the cherries on top," and the GDP continues its steady ascent.

The book's other characters include dynamic executives who are sponsoring all this outsourcing, offshoring and vanilla-ization. The go-go chairman of Rolls-Royce (which naturally doesn't make cars anymore--too vanilla) spouts this choice bit of New Economy-speak, which greatly impresses Friedman: "We own the ability to identify and define what product is required by our customers, we own the ability to integrate the latest science into making these products, we own the route to the market for these products, and we own the ability to collect and understand the data generated by those customers using our products, enabling us to support that product while in service and constantly add value." Can you guess from that babble what Rolls-Royce does make now?

Perhaps most impressive and intimidating are the "zippies," the alpha fauna of Friedman's brave new flat world. Zippies are "the huge cohort of Indian youth who are the first to come of age since India shifted away from socialism and dived headfirst into global trade and the information revolution by turning itself into the world's service center." An Indian magazine calls them "Liberalization's Children," and they rule: "young city or suburban resident, between 15 and 25 years of age, with a zip in the stride. Belongs to Generation Z. Can be male or female, studying or working. Oozes attitude, ambition, and aspiration. Cool, confident, and creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks, and shuns fear.... destination driven, not destiny driven, outward looking, not inward, upwardly mobile, not stuck-in-my-station-in-life." An even bigger cohort of Chinese zippies, Friedman warns, are only a few years behind them, and together they are going to blow their lazy, spoiled American contemporaries away.

It's tempting to smirk at this ad-copy prose and at the rest of Friedman's hymn to the Grand Global March of Productivity. There are serious empirical and analytical questions about it all, too. As Doug Henwood in After the New Economy and Eamonn Fingleton in Unsustainable have shown, prophecies of permanent, digitally driven prosperity look pretty dubious. Real pay for most US workers, Henwood notes, is lower than in 1973; and as Fingleton points out, "with almost no exceptions, manufacturing-oriented economies...outpaced the United States in income growth in the 1980s and '90s." And that income growth was more evenly distributed than in the United States. It's highly plausible that the growth of the information economy has contributed to America's notable income inequality. The skill premiums, obstacles to unionizing and even greater ease with which nonmanufacturing jobs can be outsourced all tend to exacerbate income disparities. In fact, virtually the only industry in which information technology has made an unquestioned and substantial contribution to productivity is financial services. And that, from society's point of view, may well be no more beneficial than gains in the gaming industry would be--of which, arguably, the capital markets deserve to be considered a part.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.