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Thomas L. Friedman

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century Hardcover – 5 April 2005

by Thomas L. Friedman (Author)

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The New York Times columnist offers a concise history of globalization, discussing a wide range of topics, from the 9/11 attacks to the growth of the middle class in both China and India.

Print length

488 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar Straus & Giroux
Publication date

5 April 2005
Dimensions

15.85 x 3.96 x 23.5 cm
ISBN-10

9780374292881
ISBN-13

978-0374292881
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Thomas L. Friedman
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Product description

From the Inside Flap

"The World Is Flat continues the franchise Friedman has made for himself as a great explicator of and cheerleader for globalization, building upon his 1999 The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Like its predecessor, this book showcases Friedman's gift for lucid dissections of abstruse economic phenomena, his teacher's head, his preacher's heart, his genius for trend-spotting . . . [This book] also shares some of the earlier volume's excitement (mirroring Rajesh Rao's) and hesitations about whether we're still living in an era dominated by old-fashioned states or in a postmodern, globalized era where states matter far less and the principal engine of change is a leveled playing field for international trade."Warren Bass, The Washington Post

About the Author

Thomas L. Friedman has won the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work at The New York Times. He is the author of three best-selling books: From Beiruit to Jerusalem (FSG, 1989), winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction and still considered to be the definitive work on the Middle East, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (FSG, 1999), and Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 (FSG, 2002). He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his family.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0374292884
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar Straus & Giroux; First Edition (5 April 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 488 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780374292881
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374292881
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.85 x 3.96 x 23.5 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,036,940 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 764 in Professional Financial Forecasting
- 1,625 in International Economics
- 5,306 in Higher Education on Geography

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4.3 141 ratings

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Thomas L. Friedman

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Thomas L. Friedman has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work with The New York Times, where he serves as the foreign affairs columnist. Read by everyone from small-business owners to President Obama, Hot, Flat, and Crowded was an international bestseller in hardcover. Friedman is also the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Longitudes and Attitudes (2002), and The World is Flat (2005). He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Rev. Thomas Scarborough

"God Bless America"

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 October 2006

A member of the U.S. Congess donated a photograph to a local shop in Cape Town. He wrote across the bottom: "God bless America." Little did he understand what these words would mean in Cape Town: "America? Should God not bless the world?" The photograph would seem an appropriate metaphor for this book. The idea for the book was born when author Tom Friedman, a celebrated journalist, investigated outsourcing to India -- proof that "intellectual capital" may be delivered "from anywhere". As a result, he considered that "the global competitive playing field was being leveled" -- and decided to pursue the trend.

Is the world really flat (or flattening)? Is it flattening competitively, as Friedman suggests? Early on in the book, Friedman alluded to the dark side of such "flattening". He wrote: "But contemplating the flat world also filled me with dread . . ." My own first thoughts were: "Perhaps he thinks of the avarice of the West, or the deceitfulness and destruction of empire?" Yet he was thinking exclusively of "Al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks". This seemed bound to be a one-dimensional book. Did his attitude change as he developed his theme? Essentially, no. Some four hundred pages later, his main concern was "a fundamental interest in keeping the American dream alive".

Friedman considers that there have been "ten forces that flattened the world". #1. The "balance of power across the world" has tipped towards democracy. #2. "The computer and its connectivity [has become] inherently more useful for millions of people". #3. Connectivity has enabled "work flow" to be distributed worldwide. These flatteners, in turn, have empowered "new forms of collaboration", which represent Flatteners #4 to #9. Finally, Flattener #10 serves to amplify "all the other flatteners": the fast advancing digital revolution.

Friedman "always believed in free trade". Should he now? In Bangalore, he looked across "these Indian Zippies", and considered: "Oh, my God, there are so many of them." His first thought: he would not want "any American" to suffer. However, "the way to succeed is not by stopping the railroad line from connecting you, but by upgrading your skills and making the investment[s]". So the advantage comes down to skills and investments. I wondered whether Friedman missed a page in Economics 101, titled "Terms of Trade". He might have spotted the New International Economic Order (NIEO), and how industrialised countries, led by the U.S., opposed much of the agenda, tipping the world scales in their favour.

This book would seem to represent a sobering example of the propaganda of empire -- not to speak of how the deception of empire swallows those who indwell it. Not only is this a book by a celebrated journalist. He won the approval of the Pulitzer Prize committee three times -- which would represent, presumably, the opinions of a large swathe of the U.S.A. I had suspected that such thinking might exist in the U.S.A. This book provides disturbing insight.

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Mr. E. Amir

You Must Read This Book!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 September 2009

Thomas Friedman opens our eyes to the world that is changing under our nose in the speed of light! If you want to catch up with the world... Read this book! An "Eye Opener"...

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Joost Strickx

The World is Flat, still a worthwhile read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 July 2013

`The World is Flat' was published for the first time in 2005 to wide acclaim and thanks to its success (It won the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award) had quite an important impact. Whereas at that time it pointed out something new to its readership, 8 years later the ideas developed have become quite mainstream. I do not know if before the publication of this book `outsourcing' and `offshoring' were well-known terms, now however a lot of the elements which contributed to `the flattening of our planet' (the globalization), have become quite familiar notions, daily discussed in the economic press. Currently the big theme is the shifting of the economic weight to Asia, and this is to a large extent due to the outsourcing and offshoring by Western companies.
Everybody will be aware, by daily experience that the internet offers very diverse possibilities (as a source of information, as a facilitator of social networks, enabling to do transactions with far-off places...) which did not exist before. The last two decades enormous opportunities were offered globally to individuals. I was curious to know if the reading of this book in the year 2013 was still worthwhile.
It is. Not the least because I was not familiar with all the `forces' that Friedman points out having contributed to the flattening of the world (e.g. the `uploading' , i.e. Friedman-speak for the empowerment of individuals by the readily availability of advanced knowledge and technology, `insourcing', i.e. that companies incorporate the knowledge of specialized providers...).
However, Friedman does not limit himself to the description of the forces which contributed to the flattening of the planet, but he also offers remedies for the challenges and upheavals that this phenomenon creates. As such, this book, clearly having an American readership in mind, wants to show how America can tackle the challenges of increased global competition and how it can turn these into an advantage.
This book has its obvious flaws. I did have a problem with the subtitle `A brief history of the twenty-first century' as this clearly tends to enormous hyperbole and hubris. This book is not brief (more than 500 pages) and it is certainly not a comprehensive history of the century that at the moment of publication was only 5 years old.
Apparently, when one wants to write a popular book, one has to resort to simple language and use striking titles and use a catchy terminology, a recipe used with quite some success by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell (e.g. `algoholics' a term for the algorithm buffs, the `great leverage', the' great adapter' ...). Friedman uses the term `flatten' at nauseam, as if he wants to brainwash his readers. He drums home his message: the world is flat. The author tries to get his readers involved by directly addressing them and by his frequent references to his personal experiences. This reinforces the message that he wants to instill: that in our daily live the examples abound which point to the drastic changes in the world. Fact is that the book could be much shorter and this without having an impact on the message that Friedman wants to get across.

But about the contents. It is obvious that the phenomenon of globalization is still widely discussed. Outsourcing and offshoring are still as controversial as they were a few years ago. Somehow unsettling is that 8 years later, if Friedman would write the book now, he would most likely enumerate exactly the same remedies, in other words, the book might have been a huge success and might still be widely quoted, but it must be quite disheartening for the author to observe that his advice fell on deaf ears.
One can of course criticize this book on basis of its sometimes dogmatic defense of free trade, which at times seems to be extremely naïve: why would it be that countries like China and India would allow the US to dominate the markets for high-value-added products and would focus exclusively on the production of goods lower on the value chain? This is a leap of faith to which I do not subscribe.
Some arguments have become much less convincing by the examples cited: Ireland is no longer the `poster child of good reform' that it was in 2005 when Germany was considered to lack the drive to do the necessary reforms... The world looks quite different now: and China does have problems of its own and is no longer the success-story of erstwhile.
This book made me very conscious of the consequences of the increased global competition as a result of some political events (Friedman attaches a high symbolic value to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) and some technological breakthroughs. The author goes into details about the opportunities offered and the challenges and treats created, illustrating this with often very telling anecdotes and examples. However he could have done it more succinctly.

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