The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century - Thomas Friedman

في ظل: قرأت الآية دي قبل كده؟ - 12 صنع في الصين و صنع في الصين

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Back cover summary

Thomas Friedman's international bestseller is the most up-to-date and exciting view yet of today's era of globalization... He draws on his travels to India, China, and the Middle East, and on the explosion of technologies including blogging, online encyclopedia and podcasting, to show how knowledge and resources are connecting all over the planet as never before. This “flattening” of the world, he argues, can be a force for good -for business, the environment and people everywhere.

Selected Paragraphs

How the world became flat

While I was sleeping P. 1

No one ever gave directions like this on a golf course before: “Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.” I was standing on the first tee at the KGA Golf Club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance... HP and Texas Instruments had their offices on the back nine... That wasn't all. The tee markers were from Epson, the printer company, and one of our caddies was wearing a hat from 3M... The Pizza hut billboard on the way over showed a steaming pizza, under the headline “Gigabits of taste!”

No this definitely wasn't Kansas. It didn't even seem like India. Was this the New world, the Old world, or the Next world?

Developing countries and the flat world

The Virgin of Guadalupe P. 406

Think how that statement is: Egypt has masses of low-wage workers, like China. It sits right next to Europe, on the Suez Canal. It could be and should be the Taiwan of the eastern Mediterranean, but instead it is throwing in the towel to atheistic China on the manufacture of one of Muslim Egypt's most cherished cultural artifacts [; fawanis].

I can get it for you wholesale P. 408

A country's decision to develop when the world becomes flat is really a decision to focus on getting four basic things right. The first is the right infrastructure to connect more of your people with the flat-world platform... The second is the right educational system to get more of your people innovating and collaborating on the flat-world platform. The third is the right governance-from fiscal policy to the rule of law to the quality of the bureaucracy... Fourth, you need the right environment.

Geopolitics and the flat world

The unflat world P. 551

The most important forces fighting poverty in India today, in my view, are those are those NGOs fighting for better local governance, using the Internet and other modern tools of the flat world to put a spotlight on corruption, mismanagement, and tax avoidance. The most important, effective, and meaningful populists in the world today are not those handing out money. They are those with an agenda to drive reform retail at the local level in their countries -to make it easier for the little men and women to register their land... to start a business, no matter how small; and to get justice from the legal system.

11/9 versus 9/11 P. 616

Analysts have always tended to measure a society by classical economic and social statistics... But there is another statistic, much harder to measure, that I think is even more important and revealing: Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?

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