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A Great Book Everyone Should Read
(On the morning of Dec.23, 2006, I e-mailed this essay to my friends in China and the United States. A few hours later, a response came back to me from Carol Lewis, an American teacher of English I came to know when I visited Xiuping Hong’s language school at Zhuhai, China last April. In her e-mail she draws my attention to a serious mistake I made in the essay in confusing Thomas L. Friedman, a reporter for The New York Times with Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate for economics in 1976.
I’m sorry for the mistake, and have made corresponding changes in the essay. Here’s the improved version.
By the way, Carol’s fast response is a small example of the world being flat. Just a dozen years ago, that was impossible for people like Carol and me because e-mail, a contemporary miracle, was unknown to us. Dem.24, 2006)
There are numerous good books in the world. Only a few of them are great, though.
When do I call a book great? When, by “joining the dots,” the book enables me to see old, ordinary things in a new way, when it excites me with its fresh ideas and insights, when I begin to quote the author again and again till they have become part of my life and the author’s new concept has become part of my belief, and when I wish eagerly to share those ideas and concepts with my friends.
The World Is Flat, a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century[1] by Thomas L. Friedman, a reporter for The New York Times, is such a book. It is the best book I have read in years. It was written in 2005.
I read the book on 20 CDs, which is even better than the original book for it provides more than five hours of new reporting and commentary, bringing fresh stories and insights to help us understand the flattening of the world.
Interestingly, Friedman interviewed many Chinese in order to write his book. Among them was a vice-Minister for education, a vice-Minister for environmental protection, the son of Jiang Zemin, the mayor of Dalian, which he refers to as China’s “Bangalore,” which is recognized by many as the “Silicon Valley of India,” and some others. Many stories in the book are about China and from China.
But – I’m not sure of this – readers in China may not be able to read a full translation of the book because, while praising China highly for its explosive economic growth, the author doesn’t have a lot of nice things to say about its political system and, at one point, he puts Hitler on a par with Lenin, whom the Chinese Communists hold in high esteem.
It is important to remember that the concept that “the world is flat” didn’t come to Friedman’s mind until a few years ago. To be more specific, it was approximately in 2001- 2003. It was in these years that he began to hear the sentence often, as a result of which the new concept started to germinate in his mind. Immediately he hit the road to do research, visiting India, Japan, China, and many other countries in the world.
As can be imagined, the concept that “the world is flat” is put forward as against the now commonly accepted concept that “the world is round.” What makes the world flat and why is it continues to be flattened? How does it affect the countries, the companies, and the individuals? What advice does the author offer to us in response to the challenges of the flat world? What qualities should parents and teachers help the young people to develop? These are some of the questions that are discussed in the book.
I’m not going to introduce the book in a systematic way. Instead, I’m just going to jot down some notes, highlighting a few of them.
- A good part of the book is about the ten major factors that render the world flat. Chief among them are the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the Windows, the Internet, outsourcing, offshoring, [2] supply-chaining, uploading, etc. People like us all see those things happening, but when Friedman relates them to each other by “joining the dots,” we come to see them in a fresh way. That’s how I define a scientist in social sciences, whose job it is to “join the dots” and draw conclusions in a way that no one else has ever done. Scientists help us to understand the world better and see it in a fresh way.
- Wal-Mart’s success testifies to the value of a global supply chain. Because no other companies in the world have been able to manage this system better than Wal-Mart, it is able to be the low-price leader world-wide. A comparison of Wal-Mar with Costco, however, is both interesting and instructive. Costco provides better wages and healthcare coverage for its employees than Wal-Mart, which, however, is preferred by Wall Street for its higher rate of profit. Many Wal-Marts’ employees and their dependents simply depend on the government for subsidized or free medical care. On the other hand, most other ordinary Americans benefit from Wal-Mart from the inexpensive goods it sells.
- Osama Bin Laden is a successful global supply chain manager, too. In masterminding 9.11, he didn’t do all the things himself. The architect of the designing of the event was a Pakistani engineer who had studied in a university in the U.S. The men who hijacked the planes were recruited from young Muslims residing in Germany and some other European countries. And these young men learned piloting in a pilot school in North Carolina. As for money, it came from many resources, one of which was charity organizations in various countries. Bin Laden’s main job was to provide what I call the drive that was required for suicidal tasks.
- There is creative imagination and there is destructive imagination. While 9.11 exemplifies the latter, 11.9 illustrates creative imagination. You’ll wonder what is meant by 11.9? Well, it was the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As we know, that wall was erected to keep East Germans from escaping to West Germany, an architecture seen by many as a denial of human rights. Though it worked for some time, it was opened in November 9th, 1989, following increasing political pressure from Germany after Austria allowed some German citizens to cross the border. The author believes that Those Austrians who made the decision to open its border to German citizens had creative imagination.
- Jawaharial Neru, the first prime minister of India after the country achieved independence from Britain, will be remembered for setting up seven (nine?) institutes of technology, abbreviated as IIT. It is these universities that have been churning out large numbers of technologists for India year after year. At the beginning, the newly-minted graduates couldn’t find jobs, so they moved to the US on mass, constituting a major force now in computer science and engineering in this country today. Nowadays, IIT graduates can easily get jobs in Bangalore, where big US companies relocate, or in the words of the author, offshore their manufacturing and services, including calling centers.
- A bad thing can be turned into good account. India’s almost abrupt rise was due to the fact that it took advantage of the burst of the dot.com bubble in the US, bought dirt-cheap cross-ocean cables and other such things and turned itself into a major factor in the service, including maintenance, offered by US companies to their customers. Another chance that India grabbed was the debugging of computers, which were known to be suffering from what was called “the millennium bug” at the turn of the millennium. Millions and millions of computers the world needed the service. The Indian computer engineers offered it at a very low price, thereby pushing them onto the stage of the computer world. The fact that cost is low and that most educated Indians can speak English helps, too. You might not know it, hundreds of Indians are now offering online tutoring to American elementary and high school students in science subjects online, getting a pay of $25 – 30 an hour.
- Every job that can be offshored has been or is being offshored in the United States. While lowering the cost and contributing to the competitiveness of a company, it has caused lots and lots of Americans to lose their jobs. Is that a purely bad thing? Can anyone do anything to avoid it? The author believes that offshoring is a trend no one can stop and that it benefits almost everyone involved, notably the ordinary Americans in the sense that it saves them billions of dollars in the consumer goods they buy annually. Globalization, therefore, benefits the Americans first of all while it benefits other people.
- The author makes two interesting propositions in the book. One is the Golden-Arch theory of prevention of conflicts and the other the Dell theory of prevention of conflicts. Basically, they imply that globalization is conducive to world peace. In his world tour for research, Friedman found that no two countries where MacDonald had made presence have ever been involved in a war, not counting border skirmishes. Hence his proposition of the Golden-Arch theory. As Dell computer becomes a global company, the stakes of every country with a Dell supplier have become prohibitively high: they can’t afford to allow themselves to go into war. According to the author, part of the reason why the border trouble between India and Pakistan in 2002 didn’t evolve into a full-scale nuclear war[3] was that a Dell supplier in India warned the Indian government of the danger of losing a lot of global investment in the country if it went into a war with Pakistan. Those two propositions apply to the relationships between China and Taiwan, the authors makes it abundantly clear.
- As for those Americans who have lost their jobs, they have been forced to update their skills or enter an industry that’s totally new for them. Importantly, as the author points out, new jobs are being created by the Americans, ever so creative, in the U.S. all the time. “The pie is getting bigger with outsourcing and offshoring,” as the author says. The author lists some of the new jobs that bring huge incomes to those who are able to do them. One such job is done by a mathematician who is simultaneously a computer scientist. Google.com, probably the company with the highest stock price in the world of about $500, is recruiting scores of such people every now and then in order to keep ahead of competition.
- For those who are ever ready to learn anew, the flat world is one where they will never have to worry about unemployment. They might be displaced by new technology or outsourcing, but their chance always remains to update their knowledge and skills and therefore they can land a new and even better job. New jobs that are listed as being created by the flattening world include: global supply-chain managers, who parcel out jobs to minimize the cost and maximize efficiency; synthesizers, who are good at making new products or services by combining parts that are made all the world; all-rounders （多面手）, who are versatile enough to take up a new job readily; adaptors, who change themselves to suit the needs of the changing world; and SEOs, namely, search engine optimists who combine mathematics and computer science.
- David Neeleman, founder and CEO of the low-cost New York-based airline Jet Blue, doesn’t do what many big US companies have been doing, that is, setting up ticket centers in Bangalore, India. Instead, he has the job of ticketing done by stay-at-home moms and retired women in Salt Lake City, Utah. Not only is the cost lowered, but the service is better than that done in India. David is a Mormon（摩门教徒）[4], and as such, he believes that giving women a meaningful job will empower them as well as improve their financial status. This is not outsourcing, but insourcing, one of what Tom Friedman considers ten major factors of flattening the world. What David has done is a classic example of American creative imagination.
- Is globalization the same as Americanization? Years ago, when I was in China, my answer to that question was yes. But Friedman offers us a new, in-depth perspective in his book. It is true that as the only superpower in the world today, the U.S. dominates the world as far as the products and services of MacDonald, Hollywood, Windows, Intel, etc. are concerned, and the dominance will continue for many years to come. On the other hand, however, downloading, uploading, information sharing, all major factors in flattening the world, enable individuals small companies to act big (and big companies to act small) wherever they are. No American company is able to replace or expunge some of the big Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Swiss or whatever companies in catering to the needs and serving the interests of their own people. Understandably, the language barrier is partly responsible for that.
- While praising the flat and flattening world, Friedman doesn’t forget a good part of the population in the world, where the world is not flat and where life is still a struggle for many people and education a dream. This, the author says, refers to the rural areas in India and China and much of Africa. Only a few miles from Bangalore, for instance, are small villages where people have hardly known what clean water is. The same is true of much of the Middle East. Uneducated people have little or no hope to be absorbed into the flat world in a meaningful way. The challenge is therefore still daunting. In this regard, Friedman has something nice to say about Bill Gates although he isn’t all for what is done by the software giant Microsoft. He is using his money to help the poor all over the world.
- The Middle East presents a problem whose nature is different from the problem facing the rural areas of China and India. The most succinct point the author makes in this regard is what is known as “The curse of oil,” a term created by a U.S. scholar. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and other such countries in the Middle East are rich in oil deposits. Is that a purely good thing? No, definitely not. In these countries, the rulers don’t have to tax the people to keep the country going. As a result, they don’t have to hold themselves responsible to the people. One may use dictatorial or autocratic to describe the political system there. At any rate, the kings or other such people enjoy unlimited power just because they were born into the rich and royal families. The trouble now is that some of those rulers have turned Muslim into a political weapon, not a pure and good religion as it used to.
- Addressing a conference of the Muslim countries and explaining such events as 9.11, Mahathir bin Mohamad (马哈蒂尔),[5]（十进位制阿拉伯数字系统; 计算机指令）, both of which are part and parcel of modern science, computer science included. But the tendency to shut their countries to the outside world for so many years in modern times has left much of the Middle East far behind the world as a whole. former prime minister of Malaysia, said importantly that frustration and humiliation are at the root of the anger of young Muslims. That’s important for us to know. Islam is one of the leading religions in the world. Islamic culture had its brilliant past, including the creation of algebra and algorism
- According to the author, China has since Deng Xiaoping doing exactly the opposite of what many Muslim countries have been doing, hence its rapid economic growth. Opening the country to the outside world is the decisive factor. Retuning to China in a recent visit, Friedman found the skylines of many cities in the country changed beyond recognition. In contrast, the skylines in the cities of many Middle East countries have remained unchanged. That, he points out categorically, is a sure sign of progress or stagnation. He uses many examples to illustrate China’s progress in recent years, one of which is a young man in Shanghai who uses a free website software to offer business solutions to small, independent businesses.
- Thomas Friedman has some harsh words to say about President George W. Bush. A man lacking in creative imagination, Bush has since 9.11 been “exporting not hope, but fear,” meaning terrorist attacks. Taking advantage of the Americans’ emotions following 9.11, he has driven a wedge among the Americans and between the Americans and people in other countries. That’s the reason, he believes, why many people in the world don’t like the U.S. nowadays. In the meantime, he has taken the country along the line of the rightwing of the Republicans and dropped the traditional values that made the country what it is.
- The things on his agenda are tax cuts for big businesses and war on terrorism, not environmental protection or education. At one time, two leading organizations in the U.S. were going to issue a joint study report at a news conference on the troubles the country was facing in education and science. They invited George W. Bush to be present for five minutes in order to highlight the event, but the president declined. Later, the author and other people involved in the conference found that he was in fact attending a meeting with big business in the same hall in Washington D.C.
- The author praises Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (温家宝) with a small but significant example. Unlike any other state leaders in the world who visit India, he visited Bangalore before going onto New Delhi in order to have a first-hand look at the hotbed of Indian technology.
- Answering a question about how he came to be a Nobel Prize winner, an economist said that his mother taught her to put the right question. To be inquisitive is one of the most important qualities Friedman believes American parents and teachers should develop in the young people. He also believes that learning how to learn is very important for university students. I’m very glad to hear that expression in the book on CD because at Beijing Second Institute of Foreign Languages, I continuously urged my students – I mean all the students at college – to “learn how to learn”. By that I meant firstly that students should be inquisitive. “A good student asks questions; a bad student asks none,” my students often heard me say.[6] Secondly, learning how to learn means that the student should learn to use tools of learning, including dictionaries, and nowadays, of course, the Internet. And thirdly, learn how to analyze questions.
- Just as important, Friedman tells teachers and parents that while IQ and EQ are both important, PQ and CQ are even more so. By PQ, he means passion quotient, and by CQ, curiosity quotient. One has to love what he or she does in order to be a success. If you are not passionate about what you are doing, don’t do it. And if you are not curious about things, you are unlikely to be much of a success. Again, I’m very glad to hear this from Friedman because I’ve always believed in the value of passion for anything one does. Remember the essay I wrote about Conrad N. Hilton (希尔顿) and Mr. Li Jingduan （李景端）? If you don’t have it, I’ll be glad to send you a copy.
- George Institute of Technology President (?) has over the past decade or so developed a new way of thinking on university education. In recruiting new students, the school now examines not just academic performance and social skills, but it searches for young people who love music and play musical instruments, whatever it might be. Miraculously, a much higher rate of graduates from GIT have found good jobs than before. And the school campus if often alive with concerts where students play. What role does music play in the development of the younger generation? We had all better be clear about it.
- A new approach to fun. “This country is geared toward fun” says Friedman.[7] In many families you find parents watch TV and kids play computer games in the evening. Everyone is having fun, but no one is reading. That’s a big problem of the United States today. In an interview, Bill Gates said to the author, “How can you become a scientist if you don’t even know how to recite the math table?” American kids hate to do the reciting, and many of them now don’t read anything in print. They just want fun, fun, and more fun. No wonder the U.S., desperately short of math teachers, has to import them from India, the Philippines, etc. The advent of the computer age is making the problem perennial. Alas!
- The sharp difference between Indian Muslims and Saudi Arabian or other Middle East Muslims. India is the second largest Muslim country in the world, with 150 million Muslims. (The largest is Indonesia.) But interestingly, you won’t find any Indian Muslims joining Al Qaeda, nor will you find any of them in Guantanamo, a military base where the U.S. keeps “prisoners of war” from Afghanistan and Iraq. Why this? Is there anything special about the Indian Muslims? The answer, according to the author, is not that tensions don’t exist between Indian Muslims and the average Indians at large, but that there is a democratic system of India under which a poor man’s boy, on seeing a beautiful house atop a hill, will say, “Some day I’m going to buy such a house and live in it.” Through hard work, of course. He is not like a poor man’s boy in Saudi Arabia, who would say, “Some day I’m going to blow it up.” When a country’s political system makes it possible for everyone to rise in status through hard work, the young men will not want to blow up things, the author says.
- Last but not least, the author quotes a Yale University professor saying that Marx and Engels predicted capitalism flattening the world in the Communist Manifesto （《共产党宣言》）as early as 1848. How interestingly ironic!
（17,800 characters）
December 22-23, 2006
Revising finished at 7 a.m. on Dec. 24, 2006
(Endnote: Charles Wang, who is now in Hangzhou, China, e-mailed yesterday to say that the translated version of the book The World Is Flat is easily available in book stores in China. Thank you for the information, Charles. Dec. 26, 2006)
(What follows are my notes written over a period of about one month, during which I read the book on CDs.)
FlatWorld
Disk.3: A Chinese in Shanghai uses a website which offers business solutions to
small, independent businesses.
Disk 7:
· Nehru will be remembered for setting up 7 (9?) Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), whose graduates mostly now live in the US. There are 25,000 of them.
· India benefited from the Sillican Valley dot.com bust and the millennium bug.
Disk 8:
· Baling, the first Middle Eastern country to find oil but also the first country to run out of it, has signed a free-trade treaty with the US.
Disk.9:
· A professor says that Marx and Engles talked about capitalism flattening the world in the Communist Manifesto （《共产党宣言》）as early as 1848.
· Indiana vs. India. Who is the exploiter and who the exploited? It’s very hard to say.
Disk 10:
· The theory of competitive advantage will continue to hold true.
· Globalization 3.0 – the pie is getting bigger with new niches being created all the time. (G 1.0 : countries; G 2.0: companies)
· SEO standing for search engine optimist as a new job
Disk 11:
· “Put the right question” made a Nobel Prize winner. Learning how to learn is very important for the university students.
· PQ and CQ are more important than EQ. Passion and curiosity play big roles in growing of a person.
· New jobs and chances: synthesizers, versatiles, adaptors, eager learners (Search engine optimists are people who combine mathematics and computer science.)
· Georgia Institute of Technology president gradually changed the way the school admit new students: Students with music talent are admitted before others.
Disk 12:
· A quiet crisis is happening in the US. More patent rights are being conferred upon Indian and other Asian countries. In some universities, 60% graduate students are from Asia.
· This culture is geared toward [having] fun. Kids are playing computer games and watching TV, as are their parents. Not many young people read nowadays.
· Bill Gates said to Tom Friedman, “How can you become a scientist if you can’t recite the math table?”
· Premier Wen Jiabao visited Bangalore before going onto New Delhi. On the other hand, President George W. Bush declined to attend an importance meeting on education in the same hall, where he was meeting businessmen.
· George W. Bush’s focuses are: tax cuts for big business, and war on terrorism.
Disk 13:
· Triple convergence (?)
· China’s Vice Minister of Education talks about China’s intention to be the wolf, not to dance with the wolf.
Disk 14:
· How culture affects a country. A country that is open to the world and open to ideas is likely to win in competition. The religious leaders in many Arabic countries don’t want foreign influence, and they continue to exclude women from most things done by the men.
· A comparison between China and Mexico, which fails to reform retail although it has many advantages over China. Not only has China replaced Mexico as the second largest trade partner for the US, but it is exporting a lot of things to Mexico, including statues of St. Guadilope.
Disk 15:
· Big companies act small, and small companies act big.
· Starbucks 8% of its sales coming now from Soybean milk, a demand of the customers, not an invention of the company.
· Rolls Royce doesn’t make any cars now. Its core competence is power system and it has research centers in many different countries, employing people from many different countries.
· HP succeeded in bidding for Bank of India in managing its information system for over 600 branches.
Disk 16-17:
· A good part of the world is not flattened yet, including much of Africa, and the rural areas of China, and India.
· What can be done to help the unflattened part of the world? HP has tried to do something in rural India.
· Lenin and Hitler
Disk 18:
· Those involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2002 were young educated people from the Arab world who had lived in Germany…
· Frustration and humiliation are at the root of the anger of young Muslims, according to the former Premier of Malaysia Mahadir （马哈蒂尔）.
· “We are all Bin Ladens.”
· The need for crude oil and other resources will drive China into cooperation with some of the most despotic countries in the world. Iran, for instance, is supplying China with 15% of its energy needs, and Saudi Arabia, 7%.
· Beijing is adding over 3,000 cars every day….The author gave a talk at Beijing Institute of Foreign Affairs, and one student shot him a question that he couldn’t answer.
· The US is in a position to set an example to preserve energy by introducing or encouraging cars that use other energy than oil, like the Toyota Prium(?).
· The Bush administration lacks imagination and will.
· Vice-Minister of Environments of China speaks on the country’s challenges in environmental protection.
Disk 19
· The threats of war continue in the world today.
· The Golden-Arch theory of prevention of conflicts
· The Dell theory of prevention of conflicts
· The manufacturing and just-in-time delivery of the author’s notebook computer involves some 400 companies in North America, Europe, and Asia, 30 of who play a key role.
· The global supply chain
· The 2002 cease-fire agreement between India and Pakistan was possible partly because of the global supply chain. It was brought about not by General Powell, but by GE.
· Al kaida has been using the Internet to create mayhem and chaos in the world.
Disk 20
· 11.9 vs. 9.11: Creative imagination vs. destructive imagination, both using the tools available in a flattened world, namely, Internet.
· Osama bin Laden is a successful supply chain manager. The total fund for 9.11 was about $ 400,000. He outsourced most of the jobs to outsiders, including a Pakistani engineer and a pilot school in North Carolina.
· The difference between Indian Muslims and Saudi Arabian Muslims
· The curse of oil: For countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran
[1] We’re only at the beginning of the 21st century, and I wonder how it is possible to write a history of the century now.
[2] The author distinguishes between outsourcing and offshoring. The former means parceling out the various stages of making a product or service to other people or companies. The latter means getting part or much of the job done in other countries like India and China.
[3] “Nuke it out” is the term used in the book.
[4] Please remember that the founder of the Marriot Hotels is (was?) also a Mormon.
[5] I forget the exact time. It should be the 1980s. The Malaysian prime minister led a large business delegation in a visit to China, including Hangzhou. I had the pleasure of interpreting for him for a couple of days. One evening, the banquet in his honor was to begin in a minute, but I was still not sure how to pronounce the distinguished guest’ name Mahathir. What did I do? I asked a Malaysian standing near me, and he told me that it was pronounced “ma-ha-dare.” Thank God I didn’t cut a sorry figure （出洋相）by mispronouncing.
[6] Here at Glendale Community College, I say the same thing quite often in order to encourage my students to put questions to me. Any time I explain a question, all the students benefit.
[7] This reminds me of what the basket superstar Kobe Bryant often says when interviewed, “It was fun [playing the game].”
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