Review: The World is Flat

Today, I'll talk about Thomas Friedman's book "The World is Flat"

To sum it all up in one phrase: "People are becoming more empowered - with all that entails."

Considering the press this book gets and its strong following, I'm really a bit underwhelmed. To be fair, his major points are valid and he applies them to the coming world and has examples of how they've worked in the past. Nonetheless, he doesn't seem to say anything at all that surprised me. And, given all the tech research he must've done, he sometimes manages to sound shockingly ignorant. For example, he talked about bittorent as a music sharing network or something of the sort. This is far from right. It's more of a process or protocol than a network; and, more importantly, people share all sorts of files via bittorent.

I dunno. I wish I had a lot to tell you about, but it's really just him talking about how things have led to globalization and why this tendency is likely to continue. My two favorite things he talks about are people who's jobs are safe from outsourcing for a number of reasons (eg locality-based job - convenience store owner) and the idea that the opportunity cost of war between developed nations is a huge deterrent (eg India/Pakistan nuclear standoff).

He also likes to concentrate on a few key things for just about everything. Titles like "the 10 _" or "The 3 most _" or "the 7 _ that _" were easy to come by and he seemed to fixate on certain things more than made sense (eg: 11/9 [Berlin wall taken down] v. 9/11). I did like it when he acknowledged that any and all of the awesome power that an individual can wield use to the world's flatness can be used for progress or destruction.

Oh well. Not all books can rock hard. I should finish Atlas Shrugged (I'm finding it a bit tedious).