Columbus reported to his king and queen that the world was round, and he went down in history as the man who first made this discovery. I returned home and shared my discovery only with my wife, and only in a whisper. “Honey,” I confided, “I think the world is flat.”
Tommy Friedman has written another bestseller - THE WORLD IS FLAT. The title is clever - BUT IS DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED TO THE THEME OF THE BOOK!
In addition, the theme is hardly new, at all; in fact it is old, quite trite, even banal: that there's no more "there" anymore, that everywhere is "here" is a truism that's more than two decades old; we live in a global village which has SHRUNK (in aprt due to technology) in the forty-three (43) years since McLuhan coined that phrase.
1 - THE MISTAKEN METAPHOR:
Historically a "flat world" is one in which "YOU CANNOT GET THERE FROM HERE!" Everyone told Columbus that he was going to fall off the edge of the Earth if he sailed west to get to the east because they BELIEVED that the Earth was flat. Columbus proved them wrong; he proved that the Earth was NOT FLAT, but a GLOBE --- he was the first GLOBALIST, and his discovery CREATED GLOBALISM, and ended the false "flat-world" myth. And need I remind you that GLOBES are all ROUND!
The GLOBE has gotten SMALLER - NOT FLATTER. If the world was flatter - as Friedman suggest - then it would have become less easy to ignore location as a factor in trade. In a flat-world, getting form the place on the left of the map to the place on the rioght of the map means you have to cross the entire middle of the map - as if, in a map with Great Britian on the left-edge and the east coast of the USA on the right-edge you'd have to transverse all of Europe and Asia and the Pacific and the USA to go from London to NY. This was DISPROVED by Columbus, and it's also why a flat-world metaphor is entirely wrong for Freidman's book. (It is "catchy" though. I guess that is valued more than truth and aptness by the MSM.)
UPDATE: the FLAT world metaphor Friedman uses is a perversion of the LEVEL-PLAYING FIELD metaphor. Friedman was told that techonology and education has made the playing field more level (a Chinese genius has just as good a chance as a genius from anywhere else because technology and education and free trade). Friedamn conflates FLATNESS with LEVELNESS - a stupid mistake.
2 - THE MISPLACED EMPHASIS ON TECHNOLOGY:
The metaphor of a flat world, used by Friedman to describe the next phase of globalization, is ingenious. It came to him after hearing an Indian software executive explain how the world's economic playing field was being leveled. For a variety of reasons, what economists call ''barriers to entry'' are being destroyed; today an individual or company anywhere can collaborate or compete globally. Bill Gates explains the meaning of this transformation best. Thirty years ago, he tells Friedman, if you had to choose between being born a genius in Mumbai or Shanghai and an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie because your chances of living a prosperous and fulfilled life were much greater there. ''Now,'' Gates says, ''I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.''
The reason why China and India are better places NOW than BEFORE is because of free markets and GLOBALISM, and NOT BECAUSE OF TECHNOLOGY. Technology is merely a facilitator, a tool, an exploitable product or service. Technology may crank-up opportunities, but it is FREEDOM - free people doing what they want - which CREATES THEM. The true ENGINE OF OPPORTUNITY AND GROWTH AND POTENTIAL IS FREEDOM - AND FREE MARKETS - not silicon chips or computer programming or teleconferencing. Can anyone deny that if China were still under "pre-Deng Xiao Peng Maoism" that they'd be just as poor now as 1949-1980?! That imaginary genius wouldn't have a chance under Maoism; he has a chance now because of free markets and free trade, not IBM or APPLE.
The MSM's failure to see the inaptness of Friedman's title and his incorrect emphasis on technology reveals their bias, and their proneness to see NO FLAWS in their "little darlings" and imaginary flaws in their enemies: To them, Friedman is a genius who coins new phrases and enlightgens us with new insights; and Bush is a theocratic, war-monerging, dumbass unilateralist.
NOT!
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