The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman

Just as I was finishing business school, three-time Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman published the book The World is Flat.. This book seemed to be very popular among many of my graduating fellow MBAs, some of the professors, and a lot of people in the business community. I turned my back on the business world and put my MBA to use in public service management. I had also been working on an MA in Philosophy at a Thomistic Catholic College, so Friedman’s work was the last thing on my priority list at the time.

However, I recently ran across a copy of The World is Flat at a used book sale for fifty cents. I decided that it was time to take a look at Friedman’s book. There have certainly been a number of macroeconomic changes in the almost ten years since this book’s first publication (2005), most notably the housing bubble and the Great Recession begun in 2008.

Friedman’s theme is not hard figure out: the flat world is a metaphor for globalization “gone wild,” where a high school graduate in the United States competes for jobs not only with other Americans but also with hard-working Indians, Chinese, and other new global economic players. The author devotes page after page of anecdotes in support of this thesis. His second thesis is that to be competitive with foreign labor (physical, mental, and technological) the American worker must learn to be constantly evolving, using an almost paranoid sense of impending change as the driving force for “rebranding” themselves at roughly the same rate as the increase in computing power.

My main criticism with The World is Flat is that it seems desperately to want to be a book of social science. Unfortunately it is not. Therefore, when we put down the text we feel as though we have learned something about the proliferation of economic and cultural globalization—but we haven’t. What we have learned is Thomas L. Friedman’s opinion about these things based upon the anecdotal evidence he has collected in his own life.

This is not to say that Friedman’s theses are not correct, but I can offer only the support for them that Friedman offers in the text itself—which is very little. The World is Flat does have many redeeming qualities, however. It is well written with a unique voice. Friedman does manage to cram in a lot of little facts and figures (perhaps to make up for the lack of a proper scientific basis for support) which are interesting. Yet, by far the most interesting parts of the book are those that give a brief glimpse into the inner workings of corporations like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Dell, and the company founded by all-around unique individual Ross Perot.

While there are some compelling aspects to the case Friedman makes with his “flat earth” metaphor, the book is too flawed to be of any serious use in guiding economic and public policy. Where it fails in its descriptive aspect (to provide any sort of scholarly research to support its main conclusions) it necessarily fails in its prescriptive methods.

I believe that if a journalist is going to undertake the type of project represented by the content of The World is Flat, he or she must work in collaboration with at least one social scientist. Much of the progress of the last 100 years has come about through the use of the scientific method to propose and then support or refute these proposals through a rigorous academic process. Without such standards, all we are left with is conjecture. It might be exquisite, well-written conjecture—but it is conjecture nonetheless.