All that being said, Friedman is an amazingly intelligent guy, and the thesis itself is spot on. The book loudly declares - about 100 times in the first chapter - that "The World is Flat", which loosely means: the boom in communication and information technologies makes the location of information-based jobs moot.
There are still many caveats to this book that he glosses over. You still can't export a haircut, nor transportation, nor food preparation. There's still comparative advantage to deal with. We're not talking about the end of everything as this and many other books often expound.
But the effects are still amazingly profound. In some ways, I think this book doesn't stress its point enough. The book stresses that location doesn't matter to do your job - in India or Russia or the U.S.. You don't need to be in Silicon Valley to innovate. You don't need to have a co-located team to be efficient.
What the book does not stress is what I believe to be a larger issue: the potential effect on governments and societies. Here is what I believe to be an especially important excerpt from the book that's nestled near the end of a section:
... Microsoft chairman Bill Gates argued to me, the "ovarian lottery" has changed... Thirty years ago, he said if you had a choice between being born a genius on the outskirts of Bombay or Shanghai or being born an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would take Poughkeepsie, because your chances of thriving and living a decent life there, even with average talent, were much greater. ... "Now," he said, "I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie."Now assume it's 2027. The playing field has been leveled per the book. The quality of life has gone up significantly in India and China and Russia and all those other places. The U.S. is still innovating, but has more peers in the first world - it's still a nice place to live, but it's just one of many.
Let's see how that average guy in Poughkeepsie is doing. Information is flowing like crazy - computers and connectivity are more prevalent than running water in 2007. Your job is tenuous, as anyone anywhere can do it. You have no advantage because you're in the same town as the headquarters. People all around the world compete for your job. However, costs are lower than ever, and uniqueness is encouraged in everyone and everything. Being novel is your only challenge, which is perhaps easier - and definitely more fun - than fitting into a cube farm.
In this world, you must have a differentiator to succeed. Mr. Roger's truism that You are Special damn well better be true, or someone in China's going to take your job. Therefore, the most important thing in this Brave New World is to specialize, specialize, specialize, according to your unique genetic talents and comparative advantage. Therefore, this is what we must instill in our children.
Is this Utopian or Orwellian? I'm a cynical optimist who believes in the good that can result from free trade and slightly- less-than-laissez-faire capitalism. I think that the Invisible Hand will force us to look inside and become more 'us'. Humans like to compete and succeed and take pride in what they do. If you are forced through economics to figure out who you are and to purposely not follow the crowd, won't that generally be a Good Thing for our psyches and our lives? Won't we learn to value diversity even more? Won't homogeneity become boring and easy?
Granted, our cow-orkers who can barely think for themselves will become more expendable to society. The pragmatist in me says "good riddance". I believe that you have a moral obligation to create something with the calories you consume and entropy you create. But the humanist in me says that we will have more capacity to care for those less fortunate.
But these less-differentiated people will be distributed fairly evenly across the globe, not in specific governments, making care of them easier. It's in societies' best interests to encourage these people towards uniqueness, which is a lower bar than attempting to make them fit into a homogeneous society. And, hey, we still will need someone to sweep the floor, as that type of job cannot be outsourced - but these will be the non-information (read: non-interesting) jobs.
Governments that treat their people well will prosper, those that do not will lose their geniuses. Extrapolating even further in time, governments will become more fair and homogeneous through competition, and individuals will become even more diverse, reversing the trends of industrialization.
I, for one, welcome our new, diverse overlords. I think that Time magazine got it right this year, but not because of the Wiki mentality - that enough of us put together can make things can work, but that we are all encouraged to be ourselves, and that's the best future of all.
