The World Is Flat

In The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman argues that a convergence of technology, policy, and economic opening around the year 2000 dismantled many traditional barriers to global competition and collaboration. Friedman, a New York Times foreign affairs columnist, builds the book around his "ten flatteners"—forces including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of Netscape and the dot-com boom, workflow software, uploading, outsourcing, offshoring, supply-chaining, insourcing, in-forming (search engines), and the "steroids" of mobile devices and wireless connectivity. These forces, he contends, created a level playing field on which individuals and small companies in India, China, and elsewhere could compete directly with established Western firms. A central framework is the "triple convergence": the meeting of the ten flatteners, the new business practices and skills needed to use them, and the arrival of roughly three billion new participants from China, India, and the former Soviet bloc. Friedman distinguishes "horizontalization," in which companies collaborate across borders through supply chains and outsourcing, from older vertical command structures. He explores this through reporting trips to Bangalore and Dalian, profiles of Indian call centers and Chinese manufacturers, and examples like Walmart's supplier networks and UPS repairing Toshiba laptops. Friedman also examines the tensions flatness creates, including the "quiet crisis" in American education, the outsourcing debate, and the challenge of terrorism and religious extremism in a connected world. He stresses that individuals must become "untouchable"—adaptable, specialized, and anchored in skills that cannot be easily automated or outsourced—and calls for American investment in science, math, and infrastructure. The book's optimistic thesis, that globalization empowers individuals, drew both wide praise and criticism from economists who argued the world remained far from level.