The World Is Flat
by Thomas Friedman

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Book Reviews of The World Is Flat

Book Review: Another example of a western globaloney pseudo theorist
Summary: 2 Stars

In an interview, Freidman talks about the buyer and stokeholder in him that love Wall Mart and the citizen and neighbour minded side of him that hates this store. How can he not connect the dots! If Walmart squeezes wages in America and Canada, two supposedly strong society where labour should have some power, just imagine what can be the result of such an integrated production process at the end of the production/transformation/extraction line in developping countries.

Mr Friedman, your computer is far from only being the result of technological and economic processes. It is also, just as those processes to are, the result of political processes, not in the sense of politics between states, but in the sense of daily politics between people, between employes, between different people and different hierarchies. Since producing your computer is both an economic AND political process (for example a factory owner in an environment without labour standard has more political power (power to get other people to do things in the way he wants more than they would otherwise if he did not have such political power), the "dell theory" is far from being a neutral nor does it always have positive results.

Friedman is very bad at answering the "Qui Bono" questions, who benefits, who don't. No wonder why he spends only one chapter on "non-flat countries". Far from being a historical reading of globalization, it is more a ahistorical reading of economic and technological changes about what changed and who benefit(ed) from it. Much of the picture is hidden by his account.

This is a dangerous book, in a sense that it serves to make the average reader believe his "hypotheses" about globalization (they aren't theories) Globalization is not a neutral phenomenon and as appealing as the "dell theory" sounds like, it excludes so many elements and actors that it could be turned around and be called the "banana theory" : there is not one country that exports banana in which people are not exploited"... or I don't know which other fancy theory one could think of...

What a sad story for someone who works for one of the top newspaper of the developped world...

One suggestion: buy it, read it, and think. Think beyond what seems natural in his book, think beyond technocratic analyses of globalisation, think about the A to Z of human affairs, and you'll see, the 'dell theory' will remain in the "flat world", that is, the flat pages of your book, and not as a tool to understand the world we live in.

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