(Book review: The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, 2005, ISBN 0-374-29288-4)

Reading Thomas Friedman’s book of mangled preaching about the world economy, it becomes clear before long that The World is Flat is like one long, terrible newspaper column whose premise is misguided and whose writer is a charlatan, a moron and an apologist for authoritarianism.

“Yes, China has had a good run for the past twenty-five years,” Friedman states, “and it may make the transition from communism to a more pluralistic system without the wheels coming off. [p. 247]”

Does this transition include events like the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989? It certainly is included in the “good run” he speaks of.

It sometimes seems that Friedman, a New York Times columnist, thinks that America’s economy would work a lot better if the country adopted strategies from Communism. He certainly finds a lot of things right with China’s system, and enlists some of his friends to bolster his point. Here’s Google board member John Doerr:

“‘You talk to the leadership of China, and they are all engineers, and they get what is going on immediately. The Americans don’t, because they’re all lawyers.’ [p. 280]”

Bill Gates met with President Hu of China recently, and in The World is Flat he’s all about that Chinese way—even, or especially, the system of government:

“‘The Chinese have risk taking down, hard work down, education, and when you meet with Chinese politicians, they are all scientists and engineers. You can have a numeric discussion with them—you are never discussing `give me a one-liner to embarrass [my political rivals] with.` You are meeting with an intelligent bureaucracy.’ [p. 281]”

Friedman also offers his own parenthetical remark:

“For a Communist authoritarian system, China does a pretty good job of promoting people on merit. The Mandarin meritocratic culture here still runs very deep [p. 34].” [‘authoritarian’ corrected from ‘authoritarianism’ 7-22-2006]

As far as labor standards, Friedman aims to at least demonstrate his good will, if less than thorough investigation, on the matter. Talking about a place in India, he reports back:

“Although I am sure that there are call centers that are operated like sweatshops, 24/7 is not one of them. [p. 22]”

Friedman makes a false claim about Salt Lake City, where members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in reality make up about half the city’s population:

“So he based his home reservation system in Salt Lake City, where the vast majority of the women are Mormons… [p. 37]”

The book is filled with frequent nagging that people in America (presumably other than himself) need to study engineering and be fired at the drop of a hat.

A little outsourcing to Russia, and Friedman scrambles for the paranoid interpretation:

“Wait a minute: Didn’t we win the Cold War? If one of America’s premier technology companies feels compelled to meet its engineering needs by going to the broken-down former Soviet Union, where the only thing that seems to work is old-school math and science education, then we’ve got a quiet little crisis on our hands. [p. 274]”

Here Friedman presses the need for lots of firing-ability for companies (like they don’t have that now or something), using dubious reasoning to try to make a point that could either have been made better or didn’t need to be made at all:

“The easier it is to fire someone in a dying industry, the easier it is to hire someone in a rising industry that no one knew would exist five years earlier. [p. 246]”

Why didn’t Friedman focus on the Middle East, about which he claims to be an expert and has previously written books on? Could it have anything to do with his cheerleading for the Iraq War, which has obviously dented his credibility and given the “liberal hawk” label a bad name? When he finally takes a stab at the region, it doesn’t work out very well anyway. What would his old friend, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, make of this patronizing propaganda?:

“The Arab-Muslim peoples have an incredibly rich cultural tradition and civilization, with long periods of success and innovation to draw on for inspiration and example for their young people. They have all the resources necessary for modernization in their own cultural terms, if they want to summon them. [p. 405]”

Apparently one element of modernizing the Middle East, according to Friedman, is keeping
tabs on what’s happening on the village level—by flying unmanned drones over people:

“He explained that a U.S. Predator drone—a small pilotless aircraft with a high-power television camera—was flying over an Iraqi village, in the 24^th MEU’s area of operation, and feeding real-time intelligence images back to his laptop and this flat screen. [p. 39]”

I’m not sure if Friedman thinks the Iraq invasion was done on “their own cultural terms,” or what that exactly is supposed to mean. Often, throughout the book, it is hard to understand what some his arguments are actually supposed to mean. In many cases the serial abuse of the concept described by the book title, “flat,” serves to mangle into nonsense what are otherwise banal or debatable points:

“All of this is going to have to be sorted out anew. The most common disease of the flat world is going to be multiple identity disorder, which is why, if nothing else, political scientists are going to have a field day with the flat world. Political science may turn out to be the biggest growth industry of all in this new era. [p. 201]”

If that is true, engineering majors should take note.

Sometimes the ill-defined jargon cascades into an avalanche of meaningless chatter:

“How does searching fit into the concept of collaboration? I call it ‘in-forming.’ In-forming is the individual’s personal analog to open-sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and offshoring. [p. 153]”

Got it? Try this:

“I call my own version of this approach compassionate flatism. [p. 277]”

Friedman also goes into the two most predictable business school case studies, Wal-Mart and Dell, during the course of the book. First an un-sourced (un-sourcing? Is that one of those new terms we need to remember?) “estimate” about Wal-Mart:

“Thanks to the efficiency of its supply chain alone, Wal-Mart’s cost of goods is estimated to be 5 to 10 percent less than that of most of its competitors. [p. 135]”

Then later, on page 414, Friedman shares a breathless, boring story about his Dell laptop and its demonstrably fine lineage.

After all that, it is hard to take Friedman seriously as an insightful commentator with anything interesting to say, especially considering that he admits that he built the book out of an inexplicable concept and a confirmation bias:

“Unlike Columbus, I didn’t stop with India. After I got home, I decided to keep exploring the East for more signs that the world was flat. [p. 32]”

Many of Friedman’s comments look, a little more than a year after publication, misguided or stupid. In this argument he seems not to realize that, rather inconveniently for his premise, India is indeed developing and testing ballistic missiles (although recent unsuccessful tests of missiles by India might even deflate some of Friedman’s hype of India’s scientific progress):

“But today, alas, there is no missile threat coming from India. [p. 278]”

Here, Friedman discusses the price of oil, “the path to reform,” and the unrealistic construct of “energy independence”:

“If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia onto the path of reform—which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil—strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. [p. 283]”

So what does he think will happen with oil at over $73 a barrel, now?

In the book, Tom Friedman’s attitude toward the rich and powerful is very much like the “junior media advisor” of Colin Powell that he quotes:

“‘My friends were all impressed,’ she said. ‘Little me, and I’m talking to the secretary of state!’ [p. 213]”

As for the history part of the subtitle in The World is Flat, this segment offers part of the narrative:

“It wasn’t only Americans and Europeans who joined the people of the Soviet Empire in celebrating the fall of the wall—and claiming credit for it. Someone else was raising a glass—not of champagne but of thick Turkish coffee. His name was Osama bin Laden and he had a different narrative. [p. 55]”

At the end of the day, Friedman is a guy who talks (in this book) about his favorite TV commercials. Is that who you want to tell you the history of the 21^st century?