"Birth of a Salesman" (TNR's Ronald Steel on Tom Friedman)

[swag]

The World Is Flat:
A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
By Thomas L. Friedman

(The New Republic - subscription Required - Newstand date: 09/05/2005)

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050905&s=steel090505

Excerpts:
. . .

Admirers of The Lexus and the Olive Tree will no doubt find much to admire again, and also much that is familiar in this exuberant and extremely wordy book. But despite its numbing length and its plethora of detail, Friedman's book tells us very little. And what it does tell us is considerably less interesting than what it ought to be telling us. Friedman waxes on, like a boy entranced by a steam engine, about the marvels of a wired, out-sourced, in-sourced, open-sourced, supply-chained world, but aside from describing its mechanics, he really has little to say about its wider significance. And much of what he does say is either wrong or superficial.

Take the title, for a start. When Friedman says that the world is "flat," he really means that the playing field has been leveled, that brilliant people and new technologies can be found everywhere, and that the race goes to the swift and the ruthless. This discovery seems less prescient when one considers that with variations it goes back at least to the Industrial Revolution. It would be more accurate to observe that the world is indeed round, in that the circle of production, distribution, and consumption is a closed one in which no actor can escape the unintended consequences of its actions. The very metaphor of globalization implies not a flat surface trailing off into infinity, but a confined sphere in which actions taken by any single player ultimately rebound upon it. In a flat world, a state can seal itself off from others. In a globalized world, such insulation is virtually impossible--which is the subject, presumably, of this muddled book.
. . .
Friedman is an indefatigable assembler of information, but as an analyst he has a fatal weakness. He is an enthusiast, even a salesman, and his zeal distorts his judgment. In one part of his mind he knows that profound technological change of the kind the world is experiencing today often causes social and political cataclysms. In this book he even quotes a key passage from the Communist Manifesto in which Marx and Engels described how industrialization uproots even as it creates.
. . .

Friedman acknowledges that the social and political upheavals caused by the onslaught of globalization "will take some sorting out." But surely it is of some consequence that the "sorting out" can manifest itself in war, revolution, aggressive nationalism, social violence, and terrorism--all distressing factors that he choses not to dwell on. Yet they, too, are an integral part of the story, and any analysis of globalization that neglects to take them into serious consideration is not doing justice to the subject. Friedman, too, should upgrade his skills.

[GreenArrow]

1. salesman?

He's a propagandist.