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June 30, 2006
The World Is Flat
Just finished Thomas Friedman's opus on why nothing is as it used to be and never will be again.
It was good, if a bit alarmist. The alarmism would probably be justified, if there weren't so many other, probably more important, things to be alarmed about.
As alarmist as it might be, I can't say I think he's wrong. If I were 10 years younger, this book would concern me a lot. If I was 10 years older, it would concern me relatively little, and if I had kids, well, then I'd really be worried.
In a nutshell, his argument is that unlike any period in history to this point, each and every human on the planet is in direct competition with every other human, and that this competition has been made possible by advances in (mostly) telecommunications technologies that make geographic distance much less of an insulator (isolator?)
The book is over 500 pages long, so there's no way I can do it justice in an excerpt, so I won't even try. Get a copy from your local library and decide for yourself.
Posted by dberger at June 30, 2006 7:20 PM