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The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century Hardcover – April 18, 2006
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In The World Is Flat, Friedman at once shows "how and why globalization has now shifted into warp drive" (Robert Wright, Slate) and brilliantly demystifies the new flat world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, he explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; how governments and societies can, and must, adapt; and why terrorists want to stand in the way. More than ever, The World Is Flat is an essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists.
- Print length616 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFarrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication dateApril 18, 2006
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.75 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100374292795
- ISBN-13978-0374292799
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What Friedman means by "flat" is "connected": the lowering of trade and political barriers and the exponential technical advances of the digital revolution that have made it possible to do business, or almost anything else, instantaneously with billions of other people across the planet. This in itself should not be news to anyone. But the news that Friedman has to deliver is that just when we stopped paying attention to these developments--when the dot-com bust turned interest away from the business and technology pages and when 9/11 and the Iraq War turned all eyes toward the Middle East--is when they actually began to accelerate. Globalization 3.0, as he calls it, is driven not by major corporations or giant trade organizations like the World Bank, but by individuals: desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world (but especially in India and China) who can compete--and win--not just for low-wage manufacturing and information labor but, increasingly, for the highest-end research and design work as well. (He doesn't forget the "mutant supply chains" like Al-Qaeda that let the small act big in more destructive ways.)
Friedman has embraced this flat world in his own work, continuing to report on his story after his book's release and releasing an unprecedented hardcover update of the book a year later with 100 pages of revised and expanded material. What's changed in a year? Some of the sections that opened eyes in the first edition--on China and India, for example, and the global supply chain--are largely unaltered. Instead, Friedman has more to say about what he now calls "uploading," the direct-from-the-bottom creation of culture, knowledge, and innovation through blogging, podcasts, and open-source software. And in response to the pleas of many of his readers about how to survive the new flat world, he makes specific recommendations about the technical and creative training he thinks will be required to compete in the "New Middle" class. As before, Friedman tells his story with the catchy slogans and globe-hopping anecdotes that readers of his earlier books and his New York Times columns know well, and he holds to a stern sort of optimism. He wants to tell you how exciting this new world is, but he also wants you to know you're going to be trampled if you don't keep up with it. A year later, one can sense his rising impatience that our popular culture, and our political leaders, are not helping us keep pace. --Tom Nissley
Where Were You When the World Went Flat?
Thomas L. Friedman's reporter's curiosity and his ability to recognize the patterns behind the most complex global developments have made him one of the most entertaining and authoritative sources for information about the wider world we live in, both as the foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times and as the author of landmark books like From Beirut to Jerusalem and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. They also make him an endlessly fascinating conversation partner, and we've now had the chance to talk to him about The World Is Flat twice. Read our original interview with him following the publication of the first edition of The World Is Flat to learn why there's almost no one from Washington, D.C., listed in the index of a book about the global economy, and what his one-plank platform for president would be. (Hint: his bumper stickers would say, "Can You Hear Me Now?")
And now you can listen to our second interview, in which he talks about the updates he's made in "The World Is Flat 2.0," including his response to parents who said to him, "Great, Mr. Friedman, I'm glad you told us the world is flat. Now what do I tell my kids?"
The Essential Tom Friedman
From Beirut to Jerusalem
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Longitudes and Attitudes More on Globalization and Development
China, Inc. by Ted Fishman
Three Billion New Capitalists by Clyde Prestowitz
The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs
Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz
The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy by Pietra Rivoli
The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto
From the Back Cover
• The reasons why the flattening of the world "will be seen in time as one of those fundamental shifts or inflection points, like Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, the rise of the nation-state, or the Industrial Revolution"
• An explanation of "uploading" as one of the ten forces that are flattening the world, as blogging, open-source software, pooled knowledge projects like Wikipedia, and podcasting enable individuals to bring their experiences and opinions to the whole world
• A mapping of the New Middle--the places and spaces in the flat world where
middle-class jobs will be found--and portraits of the character types who will find success as New Middlers
•An account of the qualities American parents and teachers need to cultivate in young people so that they will be able to thrive in the flat world
•A call for a government-led "geo-green" strategy to preserve the environment and natural resources
•An account of the "globalization of the local": how the flattening of the world is actually strengthening local and regional identities rather than homogenizing the world
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Expanded and Updated edition (April 18, 2006)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 616 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0374292795
- ISBN-13 : 978-0374292799
- Item Weight : 2.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.75 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #440,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #335 in Globalization & Politics
- #347 in Social Aspects of Technology
- #7,158 in Engineering (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Thomas L. Friedman has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work with The New York Times, where he serves as the foreign affairs columnist. Read by everyone from small-business owners to President Obama, Hot, Flat, and Crowded was an international bestseller in hardcover. Friedman is also the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Longitudes and Attitudes (2002), and The World is Flat (2005). He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
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Friedman's analysis of the new level playing field for businesses and the implications for individuals is quite engrossing. While I had noticed many of these changes myself, I had never lined them all up together before to see the big picture as Friedman has. Five years ago I never would have imagined myself an entrepreneur, running a business that serves an international clientele, but the forces that Friedman describes have both led me into starting a business, and helped me develop it. Friedman's analysis of economic factors will be invaluable as I think about expanding or branching out into other products and services. He points out that whether they are aware of it or not, virtually every business is now competing in a global marketplace. To survive, it's not enough to be a decent provider of traditional products and services at a rate acceptable to local markets, since more than ever before, others elsewhere are trying to find ways to provide such services at a lower cost, and technology makes it possible for workers halfway around the globe to compete in what once were local marketplaces. As Rajesh Rao told Friedman in interview for this book, "There are dozens of people who are doing the same thing you are doing, and they are trying to do it better. It is like water in a tray, you shake it and it will find the path of least resistance. That is what is going to happen to so many jobs--they will go to that corner of the world where there is the least resistance and the most opportunity." I found the chapter on Walmart and its development of a highly efficient supply-chain extremely interesting, since instead of being bogged down with the ideology of Walmart bashing, Friedman examines how the company became so successful (and it wasn't simply the rationing of healthcare to its workers or a desire to demolish downtowns).
Friedman argues that outsourcing and offshoring should not be taken as problems for America to solve through legislation, but rather as challenges that must be met through creativity and willingness to innovate. In this book, Friedman is more openly pro-globalization than in any of his previous books. He argues that rather than keeping undeveloped countries poor, globalization allows such countries the chance to develop. Against the charge that Third World workers are subject to sweatshop conditions, and products are made with child labor, Friedman points out business alliances who have set their own minimal standards for labor and worker safety. (Too bad the WTO couldn't adopt such standards as the condition for free trade concessions.) Friedman notes that American workers may lose their jobs to globalization through outsourcing and offshoring, but he quotes David Rothkopf "most jobs are not lost to outsourcing to India or China--most lost jobs are `outsourced to the past.'" Thus, Friedman argues parents and teachers need to do the best possible job to prepare students for the job market of the future, in which students will have to compete on a level playing field with foreign nationals while new technology is constantly being adopted. Craig Barrett of Intel warns "Standard of living is related to the average value add of your workforce, and that is related to average educational level of your workforce. If you downgrade the average educational level of your workforce, relative to your competition, your standard of living will decline."
Friedman points out the value of trust in today's marketplace, noting that "trust is the foundation of innovation and entrepreneurship." I felt this point should have received even more stress in this book. For a few years, I taught Web development in the Middle East. My students learned how to create Web sites capable of e-commerce, but what was the point? Their brick and mortar marketplaces are so lacking in trust, that it was laughable for them to ever conceive of running the kinds of e-commerce Websites hosted in the US. Here, our level of trust has enabled mail order businesses to be successful for over 100 years, and it was a fairly simply jump from catalog orders to e-commerce. But in a culture where there is an adversarial relationship between merchant and customer in face-to-face transactions, where each wonders if money and product will surrendered as agreed, and where the merchant absolves himself from all responsibility for the quality of the product once he gets the money in hand, e-commerce will never be more than a pipe-dream. When considering who will be the winners and losers of the global marketplace of the future, trust and trustworthiness will play at least as important a role as access to technology and ability to use it. This book is a weighty tome, both physically as well as conceptually. Reading it is a project in itself, but the material contained in it is essential for citizens of the 21st century.
Now having said that, how often in a lifetime do you come across people that REALLY make you THINK? People who CHALLENGE the assumptions that underpin the entire framework upon which each of us has to understand, interpret, and ACT ON the world. This is Tom Friedman's gift to us. Even if he's not completely right, it matters only that he has the rest of us thinking about what he's saying, and for this we should be grateful.
You want to read this book if:
1) You find a compelling need to understand what telecommunications, and the new information age means to you, me, and the rest of us?
2) You find it important to know if you and I are going to be able to do the work we are doing right now for the rest of our lives?
3) You want to know if the United States is going to continue to be the world's only superpower with hegemony over different areas of the world, and technology.
4) You want to know if we are in fact at an INFLECTION POINT (Andy Grove -Intel), where the world as we know it is about to change radically in ways we can not currently envision?
Are these questions important to YOU?
I believe these are vital questions, that each of us has to explore and make decisions about, and then EXECUTE what is best for each of us. Tom Friedman does an extraordinary job in conveying to you the state of the world as it really is, not as we would like it to be, or as our politicians would like us to believe. It would seem that some readers are not happy with Friedman? They find him arrogant, too intellectual, just full of himself, and irritating.
This isn't about the messenger - it's about the MESSAGE
The message is one of hope, but we have to be listening. What has happened very simply is that a trillion dollars worth of new high-tech telecommunications cables were installed around the world in the late 1990's, with no real intended purpose, except there was the money to be spent. It then became apparent that you could talk via telephone or computer across the planet for the SAME COST as someone 200 feet away in your neighbor's home - The world was never the same again, or as the book's title indicates, THE WORLD IS FLAT.
CHEAP Bandwidth and the Internet - CHANGED EVERYTHING
Friedman gives you the whole story. You can now get an x-ray, or CAT scan in a hospital in Iowa at 3AM, and have an Indian doctor 12 time zones away interpret the results for you real time at 1/20th of the cost. Your child needs tutoring. You can have a PhD tutor your child on the telephone from India for $10 per hour, rather than $50 or a $100 per hour here. The world is changing certainly. You either get on the train and go with it, or you get taken out by that train as it sweeps by. Either way, you are not going to stand still according to Friedman.
Look at the website you are reading right now. You can read reviews and access any book, and have it delivered to your within days without leaving your front porch. You can even download many books them instantly. You can obtain the knowledge of the universe while sitting on a river in Montana, or a cattle ranch in Texas. This is fantastic, and this is indeed transforming the way we think, act, and execute.
You Can't Ignore Friedman, but you can't EXTRAPOLATE the future either!!!
Friedman talks about, how many people seem preoccupied with the notion of China and India overtaking the United States, and or the world changing to become something we don't recognize today. If there is one thing that is certain about the future, it is that you cannot take what you see right now, and extrapolate into the future. Life just doesn't work that way.
The United States is the only country in history that imports more people and makes them citizens of America, than the rest of the world COMBINED. Think about it, we are in a constant state of REJUVENATION. No other country can begin to claim this.
In addition this country produces genius level individuals greater than any other country, witness the sheer number of Nobel Prize winners, and the innovations that just don't happen anywhere else. Whether it's the invention of the Internet, the PC, vaccines, new media, or managerial ways of thinking and executing. It's all happening here, and probably will, for decades to come.
Read Tom Friedman, embrace the future, and enjoy a remarkable new world, just as Columbus, the Mayflower settlers, and our founding fathers enjoyed. Tom Friedman provides a roadmap, but only up to a point. How the rest of the story gets written is up to us. Good luck.
Richard Stoyeck
The book is a bit longer than necessary, however, Friedman has composed it in a fashion that is easy to follow, well written, and full of interesting details and conversations. For me, one quality of a great book is the amount of thought and reflection it inspires while reading and more importantly, after. No one can predict the future and this book isn't one that does. What it clearly succeeds in is demonstrating the general trend of the global landscape brought on by the internet. The addition of countries like India and China into the global communications infrastructure has empowered a massive pool of talent with opportunities that they did not have before, and this has and will continue to make things more competitive for both individuals and established institutions. Understanding the trend and moving in that direction is much better than fighting.
Just looking at the impact of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to empower the people recently in the Middle East, many of Friedman's points are vindicated. I have bought copies of this book for family members and friends and believe it's a must read for parents with young children who want to best prepare them to compete and succeed in the competitive global landscape of the future.
The only reason I give this book 4 stars is the sections on al-Qaeda and terrorism which were the only part of the book that felt forced and dragged. Considering the situation back then, however, I can see why Friedman may have felt the need to include this subject.
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結構読み応えありました、今後活用して行きます。
wanted oranges, I got tomatoes. I can cook, I can manage. But
titles have to be a window into the book. And the title opens to
a landscape that is not what the title says.