‘The World is Flat…’ ‘must reading’ on history of 21^st Century

Catholic News Service

Some books sacrifice details for broad vision. Others focus on constituent parts but sacrifice perspective. "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century" is the product of a thoroughly modern man — one who doesn’t believe in sacrificing anything.

Thomas L. Friedman has written a book that does something only the best journalists can do. He has built a comprehensive edifice of what life is shaping up to be in the new century by attending to a host of individual building blocks, each fascinating in its own right and illuminating of the whole structure.

Today’s publishing mantra is "find a niche." Friedman disdains one. Asked what his book was about, he could have replied: "It’s a collection of vivid anecdotes, sprinkled with enlightening statistics, that revisits and revises virtually every common assumption about what is happening now and what will happen in the next century everywhere in the world."

Fortunately, with three Pulitzer Prizes and two highly praised, popular books to his credit, he was permitted to work against the grain. He apparently started by purchasing airplane tickets to all the major cities in the world and arranging side trips to obscure locations in India, China, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, Europe and Africa. The rest, as they say, is history.

Friedman describes 10 forces flattening today’s world — making it smaller, more interactive and interdependent. Some, like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the day Netscape went public, are events. Others, like open-sourcing and supply-chaining, are processes. Still others, what he calls "the steroids," are characteristics the events and processes have in common.

Around the year 2000, these forces reached a triple convergence — "of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration." In the new world resulting from this convergence, Friedman says, "the winners will be those who learn the habits, processes and skills most quickly."

To his credit, Friedman pays attention to the losers as well as the winners — insisting that, in a more interactive and cohesive world, permitting billions of people to be losers costs everyone dearly. "We are letting a huge pool of potential contributors slip under the waves," he writes. Humanitarian tragedies aside, this is an "incredible lost contribution" to the welfare of everyone.

When he writes of Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, his focus is how Gates is betting billions on making the world a better place. That’s good news in a world whose life-sustaining processes are rapidly transcending the boundaries of nation-states, which will have an ever-harder time being relevant as people work, shop and live with ever-less regard for political boundaries.

So is this a book about politics, economics, business, technology, sociology, psychology or ecology? Yes, it’s about all of that. Friedman writes about these heavy matters without ever plodding, ever boring the reader. Instead, one has the sense of being on a whirlwind tour, going to exotic places and meeting fascinating people — most of whom have found leverage in a flattening world.

Friedman’s eclectic gift is apparent in his list of what’s required to achieve "compassionate flatism" in the days ahead: "leadership, muscle building, cushioning, social activism and parenting." Yes, parenting! "We need a new generation of parents ready to administer tough love," he argues. Some things never change.

But most things do.

For anyone who would like to know more about the what, how and where of change today — and how to use that knowledge to their advantage or to serve the common good — "The World Is Flat" is absolutely must reading. Fortunately, it’s a chore readers will find absolutely fascinating.