The Flat Earth Policy

By Romesh Ratnesar

Thomas Friedman can be hard to take. Readers of his foreign-affairs column in the New York Times have come to tolerate Friedman's annoyingly omniscient, conspicuously corny style because of his flair for addressing dizzying global conundrums with common sense. But Friedman's bravado has been sapped by Iraq: his attempts to distance himself from the Bush Administration's handling of a war he supported has forced him into some painful intellectual contortions.

It's a relief, then, to find little mention of Iraq in Friedman's new book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 488 pages). Instead the author embarks on a "trail of globalization" that leads him from Wal-Mart warehouses in Bentonville, Ark., to office parks in Bangalore, India. Thanks to a convergence of trends--cheap telecommunications, expanded trade, open-source software, Google--the global playing field is being "flattened" faster than ever before, allowing workers in India and China to compete with, and even outperform, their U.S. counterparts. Friedman sees this transition as the century's epic story line, one that may break the red-blue divide of U.S. politics while lifting millions of young Chinese and Indians into the middle class. In the flat world, he gushes, "you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part."

Friedman's upbeat thesis occasionally collides with reality: even in India, the high-tech sector accounts for just 0.2% of employment. He concedes that the rapid spread of technology and information may also boost Islamic extremism, by heightening Muslims' frustration at the underdevelopment of their societies. But Friedman is a born optimist. When he asks the young Indians doing jobs outsourced from the U.S. whether they are worried about terrorism or war with Pakistan, they tell him they're too busy working. To Friedman, that's a sign that a flatter planet will be a better one. "To the extent that this process happens," he writes, "it will absolutely make the world safer for American kids." It's tough not to hope he's right. By Romesh Ratnesar