“The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century”  Thomas L. Friedman  Farrar, Strauss and Giroux    2005

Selected quotations chosen by Delton Krueger

The 10 great levelers that Friedman sees as forces driving globalization:

01 Fall of the Berlin Wall  -  11/9/89 – move toward democracies/free markets
02 Netscape IPO – 8/9/95 – sparked massive investment in fiber-optic cable
03 Work Flow Software – coordination between far flung employees
04 Open-Sourcing – Collaborate revolution of open source programming
05 Outsourcing – Migrating business functions to places like India
06 Offshoring – Contract manufacturing in places like China
07 Supply-chaining – Networks of suppliers, retailers, customers e.g. Walmart
08 Insourcing – Giants like UPS take control of customer supply chains
09 In-forming – Power searching gives everyone access to information – Google
10 Wireless – Technology makes collaboration mobile and personal

The first part of the book goes into each item by displaying specific instances and personal stories that make clear the nature of the force.

“In the future globalization is going to be increasingly driven by the individuals who understand the flat world, adapt themselves quickly to its processes and technologies, and start to march forward….they will be every color of the rainbow and from every corner of the globe.”  P 183

“America, as a whole, will do fine in a flat world with free trade – provided it continues to churn out knowledge workers who are able to produce idea-based goods that can be sold globally and who are able to fill the knowledge jobs that will be created as we not only expand the global economy but connect all the knowledge pools in the world. There may be a limit to the number of good factory jobs in the world, but there is no limit to the number of idea generated jobs in the world.”  P.230

“In a flat world you really do not want to be mediocre.” P.237

  “Untouchables, in my lexicon, are people whose jobs cannot be outsourced.”  P.238

“Coupled with…universities, public and private research labs, and retailers – we have the best-regulated and most efficient capital market in the world for taking new ideas and turning them into products and services.” P.245

“Compassionate flatism.” leadership, muscle building, cushioning, social activism and parenting.

  “The whole mind set of a flat world is one in which 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 muscle (portable benefits and opportunities for life long learning) to do that” P.284

  “What all these leaders confronted was the irrefutable fact that more open and competitive markets are the only sustainable vehicle for growing a nation out of poverty, because they are the only guarantee that new ideas, technologies and best practices are easily flowing into your country and that private enterprises, and even government, have the competitive incentive and flexibility to develop these new ideas and turn them into jobs and products.”  P.315

  “When it comes to economic activity one of the greatest virtues a country or community can have is a culture of tolerance…Tolerance breeds trust and trust is the foundation of innovation and entrepreneurship.” P.327

  The two intangible qualities that determine whether or not a society can change:
   1.      “A societies ability and willingness to pull together and sacrifice for the sake of economic development and
    2.      the presence in a society of leaders with the vision to see what needs to be done in terms of development and the willingness to use power to push for change rather than to enrich themselves and preserve the status quo.” P. 330

  “The more self confidence you have, the more diminishes your mythologies and complexes” as said by Luis Rubio of the Center of Research and Development in Mexico P.336

  Right now the most important health system in the world is mothers. Malaria is the greatest killer of mothers on the planet right now. Ill health traps people in poverty. Indian high tech counts for 0.2% of employment – add those in manufacturing and export and it comes to 2.0%   In India those who are half poor see possibilities and then lose hope and become more religious, more immersed in the caste system and dirty politics. Economic mobility is stalled. The moral is: Work for better governance in poor countries.

  “They (Arab culture) are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion or remain forever in the rear of human technological advance.”  P. 399

  “Terrorism is spawned by the poverty of dignity.”  P.400

  British politician Richard Cobden in 1857 said: “Free trade is God’s diplomacy. There is no other certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace.”  P. 414

  The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention:
“No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dells, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they both are part of the same global supply chain.”  P 412

  “The best thing outsiders can do for the Arab-Muslim world today is to try to collaborate with its progressive forces in every way possible – from trying to solve the Arab-Israel conflict, to stabilizing Iraq, to signing free trade agreements with as many Arab countries as possible – so as to foster a similar war of ideas* within their civilization. There is no other way”  P. 406

*The reference is to the US Civil War which was a war over the ideas of “tolerance,  pluralism, human dignity, and equality.”

Iraq , Syria , South Lebanon, North Korea , Pakistan , Afghanistan and Iran are part of no major global supply chain.

“Militant global supply chains” have arisen with the plan to “advance a highly destabilizing, even nihilistic, agenda.” P. 429  Islamo-Leninist terror networks are in place – they do not need investors – only recruits, donors and victims. TF calls this “The Virtual Caliphate which produces suicide bombers through a recruitment and assignment process using flat world technology.

Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist is quoted: “Because irrationality is more emotionally loaded, it requires less knowledge, it explains more to more people, it goes down easier.”  P. 432

“There may be nothing more dangerous than a failed state with broadband capabilities”. P. 435

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, and IBM scientist says: “We need to think more seriously than ever about how we encourage people to focus on productive outcomes that advance and unite civilization – peaceful imaginings that seek to minimize alienation and celebrate interdependency rather than self-sufficiency; inclusion rather than exclusion; openness, opportunity, and hope rather than limits, suspicion, and grievance.” P 443

“We really do have to find ways to affect the imagination of those who would use the tools of collaboration to destroy the world that invented those tools.”  P. 447

Imagination grows out of the stories that nurture people and how those narratives feed the imagination. “Only they can reinterpret their narrative, make it more tolerant or forward looking, and adapt it to modernity.” P. 453

“The more any religious imagination – Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist – is shaped in an isolated bubble, or in a dark cave, the more its imagination is likely to sail off in dangerous directions.” P. 463

 

Notes taken on July 13, 2005     Delton Krueger