Environmental Science & Technology The environment isn’t flat

"Thomas Friedman discovered that The World is Flat (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2005) while touring information services companies in Bangalore, India. According to Friedman, a “flat world” represents a level playing field in which free trade, open markets, and globalization have created equal economic opportunity for all. This great flattening was made possible by the end of the Cold War, and the advent of the Internet, high-speed broadband communications, open-source software, powerful search engines, and wireless technologies. To be sure, a flat world challenges developed countries like the U.S. to be as economically nimble and efficient as China and India while still trying to pay labor forces 5–20 times more.

Overall, it is a fascinating and thought-provoking book. But Friedman is such an unrepentant cheerleader for globalization and free markets that he fails to recognize severe constraints on production caused by environmental degradation.

Can the environment really assimilate the current consumption patterns of even one U.S., let alone three? Can we raise the living standard for 3 billion more people in developing countries from poverty to the middle class, from an annual income of $3000 to $20,000 per capita, from an annual energy consumption of 30 to 150 gigajoules per person, from an emissions level of 0.5 to 6.0 metric tons of CO2 carbon per person per year? Can our atmosphere assimilate an additional 10 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases every year when we have the equivalent of five more countries with U.S. emission rates?

Of course, the answer is NO."

redux [07.26.05]
The New York Review of Books The World Is Round

"Friedman's by now famous discovery of the world's flatness came to him when he was talking to Nandan Nilekani, CEO of one of India's leading new high-technology companies, Infosys Technologies, at its campus in Bangalore. The Indian entrepreneur remarked to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." The observation is commonplace, but it hit Friedman with the force of a revelation. "What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened.... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!" Five hundred years ago, Columbus "returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round." As a matter of fact it was not Columbus who provided the proof but the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, whose ship circled the globe in a three-year voyage from 1519 to 1522. Regardless, Friedman sees himself as a latter-day Columbus who has discovered that the world is no longer round: "I scribbled four words down in my notebook: 'The world is flat.'"

The metaphor of a flat world is worked relentlessly throughout this overlong book, but it is not its incessant repetition that is most troublesome. It is Friedman's failure to recognize that in many ways, some of them not difficult to observe, the world is becoming distinctly less flat."

Wired Magazine Why the World Is Flat

"This is Globalization 3.0. In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind."

The New York Times Global Playing Field: More Level, but It Still Has Bumps
[requires 'free' registration]

"Mr. Friedman is right that there are forces flattening the world, but there are other forces making it less flat. At issue is the balance between them. So is the world really much flatter than before?"

"Meanwhile, the new ''rules of the game'' that were part of the last round of global trade negotiations -- notably intellectual property regulations requiring all countries to adopt American-style patent and copyright laws -- are almost surely making the playing field less level. They will make it easier for those who are ahead of the game to maintain their lead."

New York Press FLATHEAD: The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.

"On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is."