The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Grundlagenlektüre für das Verständnis unserer gegenwärtigen Weltwirtschaft und deren Probleme ( )

I tried to plow through this book, but Thomas Friedman is the most brain-dead parrot of the ruling class I have ever known, so I couldn't finish it.

His view of globalization is that now, thanks to the paternalistic global order constructed by US multinational corporations, there is cultural and monetary things of worth out there in the vast unexplored jungles of savagery called "not the United States." As an ahistorical text that ignores the fact that elites have been trading from Occident to and from Orient for hundreds of years, the book ignores entirely the poor.

How wonderful it is to be ruling class in this new era, where poor people from all over the world can service the rich like Friedman. What an asshole.

Recommended for: fireplaces, doors that need stopping, houses without coasters, etc. ( )

The world is flat talks about globalisation and it goes through 3 phases of this process. The period between 1492 and 1800 he calls globalisation 1.0. It’s a period fuelled by muscle power and the national economy. The bigger the country you came from, the greater the chances you would do well in international trade. The second era lasted from 1800 until 2000 and, naturally, was called globalisation 2.0. It was the era of multinational companies and decreasing cost of transportation thanks to the steam engine, railroads, ships and then telecommunications to move goods and information from continent to continent, creating global markets. Finally, globalisation 3.0 is the period from 2000 to the present. The third phase is driven by empowered individuals from countries outside both the United States and Western Europe and it is a result of convergence and creations of a global web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration. Sharing of knowledge and work in real time without regard to geographical dislocation made the world “flat”. We are going from vertical structures to horizontal in terms of how value will be created.

Next, the author of the book details 10 flatteners, in other words, 10 forces and events that came together responsible for creating the world we exist in.

So the first one was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I know that it happened before 2000. Anyway, the fall was symbolic as it has shown that free-market economies were the way to get ahead and centrally-controlled communism was on the way out. Deregulation became very much in favour and bureaucratic control became something to avoid at all costs. A lot of countries opened up their economies towards the global marketplace.

The second flattener was in September 1995, and that was the day when Netscape went public. It brought the internet alive and...(if you like to read my full review please visit my blog https://leadersarereaders.blog/2019/01/31/theworldisflat) ( )

In this brilliant book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the 21st century; what it means to countries, companies, communities and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt.

The World is Flat is a complex look at the systems and infrastructure that goes on within our world. It also greatly explains how people throughout the world, especially in developing countries are able to work for companies in the U.S. I would reccomend this book to anyone interested in getting a job in the next four years. ( )