The World Is Flat. An interview with Thomas L. Friedman
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
Thomas L. Friedman
JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I’m Joanne Myers, Director of Merrill House Programs. On behalf of the Carnegie Council, I would just like to thank you all for joining us on this very special morning.
Tom Friedman is our speaker, and his book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, will be available for you to purchase at the end of the program today.
Everybody knows that Tom Friedman is probably the most famous columnist in America today. We know that his accomplishments are legion, his travels legendary. We know that his earlier books have been on the bestseller lists for months at a time and that he thrice received the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
QUESTION: That was brilliant, a real eye-opener. My question is, and you can generalize or be as specific as you like, what is the role of education in respect of this revolution, this flattening you have described to us?
THOMAS FRIEDMAN: What I have just given you are just the first two chapters of the book. The middle third of the book is really trying to ask that question in terms of the United States. I am really focused here on my own country. What does all this flattening mean for us? Basically, when the world goes flat, we are connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. Suddenly, that person in Bangalore or Beijing or Romania can now plug and play.
I believe we are on the cusp of one of the greatest eras of innovation that the planet has ever seen. That is the exciting news.
But to be able to plug and play in this world, you have to have the educational skills to do that. As we push out the boundaries of knowledge farther, you have to have more education. Think of Firefox. It took a guy at Stanford and a guy in New Zealand to collaborate, to reach the next new level of Microsoft Explorer. So that is why collaboration becomes so important, and that is why education becomes so important.
A point Bill Gates made to me is that if you had a choice, thirty-five years ago, between being a B student in the Bronx or a genius born in Bangalore, there is no question; your life opportunities would be so much better if you were a B student in the Bronx. You could be a super-genius in Bangalore, but you really couldn’t translate that into anything. When the world is flat, it is just the opposite. You do not want to be a B student in the Bronx, because every genius in Bangalore can now plug and play more directly than ever.
One of the things I do in the book is profile the Microsoft Research Center in Beijing. As Gates explained to me, it is now the leading research center for Microsoft. They have three research centers, one in Cambridge, one in Redmond, and since 1998, one in Beijing. I don’t know if you know how they organized this research center: they went to the leading scientific and technical universities around China, a country of 1.3 billion people, and gave IQ tests to the top 2,000 students. Then they chose twenty for their research center in Beijing. Do you know what kind of salmon you have to be to swim upstream in China to make it to the Microsoft Research Center in Beijing, which the Chinese government allows to grant postdoctoral degrees? As they say at the Microsoft Research Center in Beijing, when you are one in a million, well, there are 1,300 other people just like you.
So we don’t have the education here — as Bill Gates said, our high school education is basically obsolete. On test scores for math and science at fourth grade level, we are ahead; by eighth grade we are even; and by twelfth grade we are behind—which means our students are getting dumber as they go through school, to put it bluntly.
I interviewed Bill Brody, the president of Johns Hopkins University, for the book. He told me a story about a parent calling him to complain that her son could not understand his calculus teaching assistant because his Chinese accent was so thick. Bill looked into it and discovered that all his math TAs were from China.
So we have a problem. I think we are at a moment of colossal stupidity right now in this country. We have a president who is trying to take apart the New Deal at a time when we need a whole new New Deal around the flattening of the world and what we need to empower our people—our young people and our older people—with the right health care, the right pension, the right safety nets, the right education, to get ready for the flat world.
So the second third of the book is about what I call my own philosophy, which is “compassionate flattism.” My argument, basically, is that when the world goes flat, “flattism” represents as fundamental a challenge to our society as communism. If we don’t have as comprehensive a response to “flattism” as we did to communism, we are going to get creamed. There is no job that says, this is an American job. In a flat world, it is going to go to the best, most able person who gets the job.
QUESTION: I want to take you to your other area of expertise, the Middle East. Perhaps with the exception of al-Qaeda, most of the Islamic world is not involved with the flat-earth society. I want to know, what do you think is the significance of the fact that al-Qaeda is involved and the rest of the Middle East doesn’t seem to be involved?
THOMAS FRIEDMAN: That is a good question. The last third of the book is about that. The last third of the book is about the geopolitics of all this. As you rightly said, al-Qaeda is what they call in the tech world an early adopter. Terrorists are early adopters, generally speaking — much earlier than our Pentagon, in fact.
One of the reasons Microsoft insists that its employees have to be the first beta testers of every new software that comes out is not just so they can test it and find the bugs; it is because if this software is going to make you more productive, Microsoft wants to be the first to adopt the technology. That is a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, terrorists tend to be early adopters. The person who understood global supply chains almost as well as Sam Walton was Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda is nothing more than an open-source global supply chain, only it is a suicide supply chain. When a suicide bomber is deployed in Baghdad, another is manufactured in Riyadh, just like Wal-Mart. (Wal-Mart didn’t like it when I wrote that. I don’t know why. Touchy, touchy, touchy.)
In the last part of the book, I take my flat world theory and apply it to the Middle East. One of the things, first of all, that happens when the world goes flat is that you get your humiliation fiber-optically. You get your humiliation now at 56K, right in the face. You can see just where the caravan is and just where you are, and just how far behind you are.
The latest Arab Human Development Report came out yesterday. In the book I tell a story about how, just after the Madrid bombings, I suddenly remembered that bin Laden had said something about Spain. So I Googled it. What came up made the hair on my arms stand up. It was from one of the tapes, the first tape, released in January of 2004. He suddenly says, “Spain used to be a Muslim country. We used to own this country. You know what? The entire Arab world, the combined GDP of all twenty-two Arab states, doesn’t equal that of Spain, this country we owned.”
Do you know where that statistic is from? It is from the first Arab Human Development Report, which was published in 2002. That was the lead of my column about the first Arab Human Development Report. Maybe it was the lead of someone else’s column, too. Maybe other Arab newspapers made it the lead. But what it means is that bin Laden was sitting in a cave somewhere in 2002, reading the first Arab Human Development Report. Either he got a yellowed newspaper clipping, or he downloaded it from his cave. It is the only way he could have gotten that information.
So he got his humiliation fiber-optically. That is why I happen to think that 9/11 is all about humiliation and the sense of being left behind and the anger and resentment that produces. The flattening of the world really intensifies that sense of relative deprivation.
I think what happened in Lebanon is surely a product of the Lebanese watching what happened in the Ukraine and watching what happened in Baghdad. In a flat world, they say, “If they can do that vis-à-vis the Soviets, why can’t we do that vis-à-vis the Syrians?”
Again, on the upside, I have a chapter on what all this means for companies. One of the points I make is that when the world goes flat, the big can act really small by enabling their customers to act really big. That is the Southwest Airlines example. Big companies can now act so small, they can make you your own ticket agent.
The opposite is also true. The small can act really big. The example I give in the book is that in the history of the NASDAQ there has only been one Arab company listed. It is called ARAMEX. It is kind of a FedEx for the Arab world, run by a guy named Fadi Ghandour, a remarkable Jordanian. I basically tell the ARAMEX story and how ARAMEX took over this little company using Jordanian software engineers — the whole global package-delivery system of Airborne Express, after Airborne was mergered. It is a remarkable story. Every Arab should know the ARAMEX story. Why do they all know the al-Qaeda story and none of them know the ARAMEX story? It is a remarkable story of entrepreneurship drawing entirely on Arab talent. So I tell the ARAMEX story in the book. It is going to cut both ways, and does.
QUESTION: I am a little puzzled. In this world, anyone who has been reading Wired magazine, for example, and anyone that has been listening to even Ray Kurzweil, who is a presidential awardee, and anyone who follows the technological world has to be aware of these remarkable changes. Apropos of that, it is this eighteen-year-old kid from some school in Des Moines that is able to change the world so quickly.
I am wondering: why the amnesia in the country? Lou Dobbs came here and ranted and raved about outsourcing. So I am little puzzled. There is some disconnect between what is taking place—and is certainly open to most of us&mdashand our government’s behavior. Is our government in denial?
THOMAS FRIEDMAN: It is an interesting question. I think it operates at several levels. One is the level of, simply, distraction. 9/11 was so big. The dot-com bust was so big. Obviously, it sucked a lot of the knowledge out of the system. People saw the dot-com bust and thought, okay, it is all over. That is number one.
Number two, I had to completely retool myself in order to write this book. I am the foreign-affairs columnist. I don’t write the circuit section. You know where I’ve been? I’ve been to UPS, hanging around Louisville Airport. I’ve been to Bentonville, Arkansas. I’ve been hanging around there. I’ve been hanging around Google in Mountain View, California. Those aren’t the traditional foreign-policy beats.
So I had to really retool myself in order to understand what was going on, and then to connect all the dots. I have been in this sort of war, as you may have noticed, with the foreign-policy establishment since I took over the column. Let’s be blunt about it. A lot of people have resented what I did with this column, because I brought it into the world of technology and finance and geopolitics. I can do the stuff with hair on it as well as anybody. I can do the “olive tree wars.”
But I also said, wait a minute, I can’t explain the world unless I pull all of these other things in. To do that, I had to go back to school. I had to learn about everything I have told you today that I didn’t know a year ago. I had to go and interview people like yourselves and try to understand it. I went back and forth with Mark Andreessen [of Netscape] twenty times before I understood the difference between XML and HTML and RSS.
Nobody likes to go back to school. So I have a whole crowd of people out there who think, “Oh, globalization, it’s just some sizzle Tom Friedman made up, that he has exaggerated.” So I nod my head and just say, “We’ll see.”
I wrote a book called The Lexus and the Olive Tree. I know about the olive trees. What I am saying is, to explain international relations today, it’s about the interaction between the two. If all you are going to talk about is the olive tree part, then you will never be able to explain the whole.
I think there is a huge bias among foreign-policy writers and academics, who don’t want to go back to school. They want to say, “What are you writing, Friedman, an investing column?” They want to pretend that it is all sizzle or it is all basically irrelevant. What counts are the issues with hair on them, about throw weights and tribal urges. I know that. But in my view, it is in the interaction between traditional foreign affairs and something else, where the explanation of world politics really resides.
So I had to “horizontalize” myself. Most people don’t want to do that. Let’s be honest: our Treasury Secretary is from the railroad industry—well, there’s a real cutting-edge guy. As for the Commerce Secretary — these people simply are deaf to this world and aren’t particularly interested in it. When was the last time you heard the president give a speech on competitiveness? So I think that this begins at the top. If the president took up this agenda, there is nothing like the bully pulpit of the presidency to make an issue relevant.
Somebody asked me yesterday “Who would you like to read this book?” I said, “I would love George Bush to read it.” I don’t mean that to be cute. I mean that because George Bush is going to be president for three-and-a-half more years. We don’t have three-and-a-half years to waste while we hope that the next person will somehow get it, whether they are a Republican or a Democrat. I would love nothing more than for the president to seize his version of these ideas and make them relevant and translate them into our politics and economics. I would love nothing more than for him to succeed, for the sake of our country. We do not have three-and-a-half years to squander, basically trying to take apart the New Deal.