Bringing the blessings of capital markets to the rest of the world was one of the chief benefits of globalization in the 1990s, Friedman proclaimed in Lexus. In one of that book's most obnoxious passages, he announced, "I believe globalization did us all a favor by melting down the economies of Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Brazil in the 1990s, because it laid bare a lot of rotten practices and institutions in countries that had prematurely globalized." Apart from its callousness, this and other comments by Friedman on the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 made clear that he had misunderstood its lessons: that someone is in charge of the Electronic Herd and the capital markets; that it's the IMF (which takes its orders from the US Treasury); and that following the IMF's prescriptions left countries more, not less, vulnerable to being whipsawed.

Still, Friedman is far from heartless. There's a frank recognition of the pain of globalization in Lexus, and even in the surprising statement that "you dare not be a globalizer today without being a social democrat." In The World Is Flat he writes, "The social contract that progressives should try to enforce between government and workers, and companies and workers, is one in which government and companies say, 'We cannot guarantee you any lifetime employment. But we can guarantee you that government and companies will focus on giving you the tools to make you more lifetime employable.'" In a flat world, "the individual worker is going to become more and more responsible for managing his or her own career, risks, and economic security, and the job of government and business is to help workers build the necessary muscles to do that."

Friedman offers three simple, sensible muscle-building proposals: portable-pension legislation, portable health insurance (with plans negotiated by government, not individual employers) and two years of government-subsidized tertiary education for everyone. (If he were a bit braver, he might have emphasized that all this and much more like it could have been accomplished for a fraction of the amount wasted on the richest 1 percent by the Bush tax cuts.) He even has a suggestion for the antiglobalization left, whose idealism he professes to admire: Form NGOs in Africa, India and China that will "promote accountability, transparency, education, and property rights" and help "ensure that the poor get the infrastructure and budgets to which they are entitled." After all, the poor, too, yearn to join the flat world: "The wretched of the earth want to go to Disneyland, not to the barricades."

I wouldn't presume to badmouth Disneyland to the poor. But one may well feel a bit uneasy about the quality of life in the flat world. When informed excitedly by a mid-nineteenth-century Thomas Friedman that Maine and Texas could now communicate by telegraph, Thoreau remarked, "But Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate." History does not record Friedman-then's reply, but Friedman-now would have absolutely no idea what Thoreau was talking about. That information technology might have the effect of making life, at least in some respects, less gracious, subtle, sensuous and profound, but instead more sterile, frenetic, shallow and routine--there is no inkling of this in The World Is Flat.

"If you are just a little too slow or too costly--in a world where the walls around your business have been removed and competition can now come from anywhere--you will be left as roadkill before you know what hit you." It sounds like the war of all against all--"turbocharged," to use one of Friedman's favorite adjectives--and the ultimate weapon, the focus of creativity, the highest achievement of this new stage of civilization is apparently...ever-newer operations-flow software, to optimize your business process. Except for those Third World NGOs, no one in the flat world seems to be doing anything of loftier significance than getting Wal-Mart's suppliers to make deliveries just a few minutes nearer to ship time or inventing a new radio-frequency identification microchip to track its inventory.

Well, it will be the zippies' world, not mine. I'm sure they will be fully as cool, confident and creative, as ambitious, aspiring and attitudinal, as Friedman promises. I only hope they'll have enough imagination to be bored.

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