Engineering & The Book Beat
Question #1
When Friedman says the world is flat, he means the playing field of the global market place has been leveled. Flat means connected, and in a flat world more people can collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work. According to Friedman, in the period of “Globalization 3.0,” technology is the driver, and we’re in for quite a ride.
Do you share Friedman’s faith in technology to facilitate global connectivity? Have advances of the digital revolution and the Internet rendered national, economic, and political borders obsolete?
November 4th, 2005 at 4:03 pm
I share Friedman’s faith in technology, but as far reaching as these new communications technologies are, they do not transcend cultural borders, which are the real definition of any nation. As different countries are connected by technology, I believe each country will hold even closer to its unique culture as a way to maintain its identity in such a rapidly changing world.
November 8th, 2005 at 5:44 pm
I believe technology will continue to facilitate global connectivity. However, culture, politics and other human structures have a strong hand in influencing this connectivity. In the worst case, the possible benefits of a flat world will be attainable for a minority of people. In the best case, the internet, etc. will be serve to help people bridge cultural boundaries and force governments to follow suit. I think Friedman is overly optimistic about the potential benefits of a flat world. Many countries are still too poor to provide the education as well as the technical infrastructure for their citizens to benefit. I don’t see that changing soon.
November 8th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
It’s hard not to be persuaded by his argument, which is carried along by a genial voice and congenital optimism. He writes with fluidity and apparent reasonableness, all the while advancing the more hopeful interpretations of the rapidly changing economic, social, political, etc., circumstances he describes. And he taps into something iconic and mythic about technology, as it’s connected to narratives of perfectibility and salvation, in which especially Americans really want to believe. Technology has been assimilated almost completely into the set of factors supposedly distinctive of American identity that seem to ensure our lasting, inherent superiority to other cultures of the world. Along with pluck, individualism, moral ambition, and optimism, for example, a faith in technology underwrites widely held notions of inevitable American supremacy. We like to see these things as if not exclusively American, then most fully developed in America, which has provided the most fertile ground for their flowering. When Friedman warns of cultures that favor memories over dreams, rather than vice versa, he’s clearly implying that America sits on the favored side of history.
I wouldn’t contest many, if any, of the points he makes about the impact of technology, in particular the Internet and the immense computing capacity deployed in the cause of supply chain efficiencies that make Walmart, Dell, and so on, such successful companies. I would say, though, that he understates some risks associated with the whole system.
Several things seem to me underdeveloped in his argument. One is the fragility of the technology on which the global supply chain and Internet-based economy sit. Hurricane Katrina, for example, destroyed cell phone networks by cutting off power and damaging transmission towers, not to mention land-based communications networks. Rescue squads, police, citizens—everyone was functioning in a pre-industrial social world for several days on the Gulf Coast after the storm blew through. More generally, similar risks threaten the global supply chain that allows end-of-the-line companies to pay ever-lower prices for their goods, all the while increasing their market share (see Walmart). It is susceptible to so many threats—natural disaster, political or military conflict, sabotage, competitor skullduggery—that reliance on it as a key business strategy seems like asking for trouble. An earthquake in Taiwan in 1999 shut down such a large portion of the world’s capacity to manufacture semiconductors that American computer manufacturers were laying off workers within days. Just-in-time inventory and outsourced production can bite back fast, when the complicated set of enabling conditions underlying their role in the system starts to break down.
Another risk of the flattened, technology-driven world is the corrosion of social structures that organize individuals’ lives and identities. Quantitative imperatives drive “flat” companies—costs of supplies and production and labor, profitability, share price—while they still rely on human factors to execute the strategies that lead to success, as measured by such indexes. Management pledges loyalty to these sorts of metrics, especially as summarized in share price, and withdraws, either in whole or in part, from a compact with workers that would bind both parties to the success of the whole enterprise. See, for example, the current bankruptcy of Delphi, after being spun off by GM. The result is the widespread anxiety over down-sizing, outsourcing, and disposability of individual workers that has been a staple of magazine cover stories for the last 10 years.
Leaders of nation-states understand, as well, that the ongoing viability of their countries’ tax base is connected to the well-being of profit-making entities within their borders. And they shape their decisions and the policy environment in general to favor them. Friedman’s example about how the burgeoning Indian IT community worked to tamp down an incipient border conflict between India and Pakistan is a benign example of this force; the energy policies of the Bush Administration show how it can destroy. Either way, this dynamic also subverts the compact between citizen and state. It makes it harder for leaders to articulate a vision of a social whole, in which people of all shapes and colors and backgrounds share a stake in the well-being of some commonly understood group identity. Without this collective imaginative capacity, reforms that seek to better the lot of a broadly defined group of citizens become very difficult. Most arguments for health-care reform, for example, appeal to a sympathetic faculty in people, an ability to imagine an experience of life different from their own, that is degraded by a system that renders every person a self-contained, self-determining economic unit.
As both companies and nations “rationalize” their structures and processes, individuals may be thrust into, for lack of a better term, a state of nature. In this state, individuals are cast back on their own devices for survival, bereft of the social structures that could buffer them from exposure to the unpredictable, often cruel forces that shape single lives. A guy who writes on slate.com, Daniel Gross, applies a corporate finance term, “cram-down,” to this phenomenon (for a start on this topic, see http://www.slate.com/id/2119327/), and it characterizes what seems likely to happen to individuals more and more in years to come. Where Henry Ford used to want to pay his workers enough money so they could buy the cars they were producing, companies and governments show an inclination today to want to pay as little as possible to large numbers of people, and as much as possible to small numbers of people. With the decay of perceived social bonds vertically linking people up and down the wealth ladder, the “cram-down” is politically and morally easier to pull off; the people who suffer aren’t like “me” (whoever the speaking “me” might be), and somehow it must be their fault for being poor, in the wrong industry, in the wrong place at the wrong time, etc.
Friedman says individuals, desktop freelancers, and startups in India, China and elsewhere can not only plug and play, they can compete and win. He says they’re not going to be satisfied with competing for low-end jobs, they’re now set to race us for the creative, the innovated work.
November 8th, 2005 at 6:31 pm
I believe that technology is the key in facilitating global connectivity. No one could have possibly imagined ten years the impact technology has had around the global. Technology has rendered borders obsolete. The best example of this is terror networks. Al Qaeda has used the internet to plan attacks around the world the past few years without this technology they would never have been able to coordinate detailed attacks globally.
October 30th, 2007 at 3:53 am
Technology has become a great facilitator. There is no doubt that there are down sides to it. But as far as business economy is concerned boundaries are disappearing. For instance, knowledge based services offer a combination of onshore,near shore and offshore solutions.
One may talk of poor economies but even nations in Africa are reaping the benefits of technology and connectivity.