I can't believe I read the whole book! Thomas L. Friedman is fascinating in his exposition of how communications technology is globalizing and, as he puts it, flattening the world. I'm not sure he really needed to drag it out for 630 pages, but he is so entertaining in the stories he tells, especially of global businesses, that a little repetitiveness is easily forgiven.
His is a hopeful perspective paying much attention to India, China, Malaysia, and other countries with large populations of poor people. They are moving more and more people into the middle class, thanks to outsourcing in this country and the technological ease with which people can do business over great distances. Friedman realizes that Americans are going to have to compete more on a global basis and that we will probably experience some economic displacement because of this, but he believes that with better education Americans will adjust and remain leaders in innovation.
Furthermore, the world should be a better and safer place when wealth is more equitably distributed and more of us have a stake in keeping the global economic system going. It is almost as if what socialism and communism have failed to do, technology is going to bring about naturally with an underpinning of democracy rather than totalitarianism.
Excellent book.
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Nice nutshell review, Linda. There is so much to say about this book; I could have gone on for another hour as "the reviewer" (such as I was). Each of us had her own thread of connection, making it an animated, horizontalized, well flattened discussion. I think Friedman would have appreciated it, not to mention that your blog here is an example of one of the flatteners—open source collaboration in an online project.
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