Word: friedmanism
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...complication and opacity ensues when Friedman discusses the process by which these forces shape the world: the fantastically muddled “triple convergence.” First, around the year 2000, the ten flatteners “started to converge and work together,” increasing global access to networks of collaboration and competition and giving rise to new business practices that sought to exploit the change. Second, the “new playing field for doing business” converged with the business practices themselves. Third, the populations of China, India, and the former USSR, granted their...
...function vitally in the global economy, but they are hardly on a par with the American executive who made the decision to outsource in the first place. Commendably, in a section that deals fairly and extensively with critics of globalization and with disputants of his claims of equality, Friedman recognizes this question. He asserts that “the world is not flat” and explains the title as literary license intended to draw attention to the issue—but this mea culpa does not arrive until page 375. The concession’s offhand placement...
...extended direct quotation that is among the book’s many illuminating moments, Sandel cautions Friedman: “A flat, frictionless world is a mixed blessing. It may, as you suggest, be good for global business. Or it may, as Marx believed, augur well for a proletarian revolution. But it may also pose a threat to the distinctive places and communities that give us our bearings, that locate us in the world. … Some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious...
...rejoinder is that, from an American perspective, one can legitimately perceive outsourcing as exploitation of cheap foreign labor but that the flat world may require trading one person’s unemployment for another’s economic liberation. But, confined so closely to his economic mode of analysis, Friedman has replied to a vastly different trade-off than the one Sandel posited. The critical issue is not merely to whom economic benefit is allocated at whose expense, but also to what extent it should be pursued at all in the face of competing claims...
...credit, Friedman moves on to discuss briefly the depersonalization that a frictionless, expansive, highly technical–i.e., “flat”–world may impose. He risks triviality, however, by steeping the discussion in Americana, evoking Willy Loman and citing a real-life struggling Minnesota wholesaler. Friedman’s pal the wholesaler may have a legitimate complaint that he can no longer “stop by the office, give the buyers a few Vikings’ tickets,” and maintain a friendly rapport with his customers. But the wholesaler?...