Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat has been ubiquitously referenced in the last several years. Friedman is a hack.

Let’s examine his treatise: Technological and economical developments have removed geography as a barrier to productivity, making it possible and necessary for people from all over the globe to work together. Quite frankly, I just stated it better than he did in his entire book. But if you are still tempted to read, The World is Flat, please realize that the cover is all you really need. Pick it up. Put it down. That’s it. You’re done.

I read this when it first released, and Friedman, in truth, doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Anyone that spent any amount of time whatsoever in (or even near) corporate America during the 1990s already knows as much, and likely far more, than Friedman’s globetrotting cocktail napkin ruminations will ever reveal. Friedman appears to have visited far corners of the globe in search of people who will quote his title back to him. In fact, through his artless narratives, we witness a multitude of shills parroting the book jacket, almost like audience plants at a hypnotist show. It’s very clearly artificial, and by that I mean... bullshit.

Take corporate experience out of it. Remove the global outsourcing initiatives, the quest for cheap labor, and the video chat boardrooms. Call tech support. Seriously, call tech support, and throw Freidman’s book away. You already know.

Over the past two years, I have seen The World is Flat appear (in serious academic citation form) in two collegiate textbooks. This is ominous. It is dangerous. The Freidman academic cult has spun four words into more than just an excuse for new diversity training seminars, they have knighted an itinerate opinion pimp as their standard bearer. Let’s examine, therefore, the man’s qualifications to speak as an expert on any topic.

Freidman is a journalist. That’s his gig, and in that capacity he bears one specific qualification: He is able to crank out a few hundred words a week at a fourth grade reading level. That’s the sum of the man’s gifts, and the full breadth of his expertise on the global economy. In additional to The World is Flat, Freidman has apparently amassed a tremendous garbage heap of opinions, evident by the number of recent tomes he has published. The man is an expert on everything… for fourth graders… for NY Times readers… and for college professors. Neat.

Real life doesn’t let you quote yourself and then become an expert by searching the planet for someone who will (with enough prodding) puke out the same four words. The blogosphere is teeming with fourth-grade level opinion-pimps. Perhaps there is still room out there for Friedman and his slobbering, gap-jawed, self-congratulating “one-world” acolytes: Or the Times. There’s always the Times.

Dịch như quần què, MÁ, đọc tức á.
5 sao cho ý tưởng, 3 sao cho cách viết dài dòng của bác Tom, 1 sao cho bản dịch này.

My cousin bought me this book when I was 17, me thinking it might actually be a "History" book, since it says "History of the 21st century" and I read about 3/4 of the god awful book, until I just could not read it anymore (especially when it got to chapters devoted to advice for businesses in globalization). I think was the first book I just could not finish because it was so awful to read.

First off his book has awful style and use confusing metaphors, you hear about flatteners and that the world is flat.

I couldn't help but make annotations every few pages about how weak his points were and how the ability to teleconference and for the middle class to Facebook does not at all address sweatshops, the painful transition of mass layoffs in industry due to trade agreements (including ours), increasing wealth disparity, and the widespread poverty in the world.

He even makes one argument about how a kid can look up all the info in the world on Google in Subsaharan Africa, so that means that we've all got equal opportunity. (And this point is defeated in that that kid won't have stable electricity source to charge his cell phone, and a ton of kids won't even have the money to have a cell phone!)

It was basically a bunch of cheerleading of advances in IT and Walmart and other's vertical integration of the supply chain.

I dunno about Thomas Friedman but I actually took really hard legitimate economics classes at university (3 actually)and I know exactly what the major economic theories promise, what the weaknesses of their assumptions are, where they don't easily apply. His implicit assumption is that the free flow of capital aka corporate globalization is good and uses metaphors and anectodes to try to proves thi and not actually spend time or citing social science proving that the world's economic playing field is being leveled (which is what he's trying to say by the world is flat"

He thinks that he can sum up the history of the 21st century by traveling first class and talking to CEOs in India and doesn't note the increasing wealth disparity in those countries.

I love Google, Yahoo, the web browser, and video chatting as much as the next person (which there are entire chapters dedicated to these different things) but that doesn't mean that I believe neoliberal economic globalization is great because we have Google.

This book really didn't have a great argument and did a poor job of providing evidence. I'd beg you to read something else on globalization or economics.

I would have given this at least 4 stars if it had been edited to a reasonable length, with less repetition. Despite what many of the reviewers suggested, it wasn't a fully one-sided account of free trade. Though Friedman's position was mostly pro-free-trade (almost all economists are pro), he did discuss problems and inequalities that arise and acknowledged the complexities of free trade. The book was also pretty thorough discussing not just government policy, but also technology, education, cultural attitudes, and even terrorism. I'd recommend it but only if you're prepared to do the hard hard work of slogging through.

read Lexus first, but this one is just as important, and just as well written

Great insights to help us understand the flattening of the world caused by technology!

This book seeks to bring forth the role that technology is playing in opening up doors for communication and international business. The book demonstrates how the emerging economies of China and India are increasingly challenging the rest of the world and the established economies, thanks to the prevalent penetration of technology.

I think Friedman has some of the best insights into the immense role that technology is playing to change the dynamic of the world economy. He does show how technology has become an inevitable part of doing business and that any company or nation that fails to embrace this will be overtaken by the imminent changes. I like the fact that he gives good examples of how real-life companies are making use of technology and staying competitive. This is a good read for any entrepreneur, regardless of your field or location, managers and executives will find this book immensely insightful.

My only criticism is that Friedman fails to address the setbacks and challenges that the increasing prominence of technology may play. He only mentions this in passing when he talks about terrorists using technology for their own purposes. He also does not talk about the censorship issues in China and the gaping matter of net neutrality. It would be great to see an updated version of it as since its publication in 2007 so many things changed.

It provides the vision of 21th century where technology can flatten all the barriers of language, distance and timezone etc. I think in some way it is genuine, but I'm not entirely persuaded.

Everything looks like a science fiction, the author envisioned what the world will be based on the trends of technology, but he didn't show any statistics to prove his points. Nevertheless, it is a very good viewpoint the human being has been approaching and actually it lifted the limit of my imagination 5 years ago.

There's a TED video tells things against this book: Why the World actually isn't flat http://www.ted.com/talks/pankaj_ghema...

Rosy colored glasses perspective of humanity and how technology and globalization trends will progress the human condition. This is a con job that supports the hyperbole and hubris of the powers- that- be. In the last analysis, all this rhetoric and technology exponentially accelerates our path to human extinction by exacerbating climate change, overpopulation, infinite economic growth, exhaustion and destruction of all natural resources; plus, ecocide and its resultant diseases and its extinction of other species - that one day may also include homo sapiens. How can the author miss the most salient threats to human existence in his research and advocate for the misguided benefits of globalization technolgical innovation? In short, this book is more fiction than truth - but I say this with the advantage of hindsight.

There was a time when I thought that The New York Times and Pulitzer Prize were beyond reproach - now I am not so sure - as it is amazingly self-evidence that they dance to the tunes of the military~industrial~consumer~congressional complex. That is not good for democracy- but more importantly the existence of humanity.

Hardly groundbreaking. I kept thinking that anyone with a blog and a social network could skip Thomas L. Friedman's book The World is Flat and lose very little perspective on the world we live in.

In other words, a lot of this material feels stale, perhaps because Friedman spends most of his time rehashing old news articles. I often found myself wondering whether Friedman wasn't just looking back over his interviews and trying to make them pay a little extra in this flat world. Almost every chapter contains two or three anecdotes that begin, "while I was interviewing..." More often, however, he refers to conversations with taxi drivers, which signals lazy journalism. Still, some of these anecdotes, such as Indiana's outsourcing of their labor department to an Indian company, are amusing enough to read again.

There's no denying that most of the people Friedman interviews are actually more insightful on the subject of the flat world than Friedman is himself. I suppose that's only appropriate for a journalist, but I've often felt that the best non-fiction writers are able to make a mundane subject like food (The Omnivore's Dilemma) or baseball statistics (Moneyball) interesting to both the predicted audience and the wider audience. Here, Friedman is content to collate the ideas of others. Let's flatly applaud this.

The only thing that Friedman brings to this conversation is the title. I have heard people use "flat" to discuss trends in their workplace, so that contribution is not useless. At other times, unfortunately, Friedman's writing is too hackneyed. His discussion of the "flatteners," which conveniently add up to ten, seemed especially contrived. Friedman talks about the future as often as he does the recent past in this "Brief History of the Twenty-First Century," and when speculating about the future these flattener trends are taking us to, Friedman's writing takes on the tone of a Ayn Rand style prophecy. I felt this prophetic voice compromised his integrity, but at other times it led to ludicrously flat prophetic writing, such as the "Great Sorting Out."

The least useful part of the book is the practical advice that Friedman offers Americans, developing countries, and corporations on how to thrive in the flat world. Just visit the Rand Foundation's website. Beyond the obvious enthusiasm for deregulation (this book was written before the banks collapsed), the advice is usually not very practical at all. Friedman is just vague enough to speak to anyone and once again I found that his writing gave off a whiff of the astrologer's incense and crystal ball. It was almost as though Friedman wrote The World is Flat as an advertisement for corporate speaking engagements.

Still, the title is very good.

The "flat world" poses a problem for anyone looking to have value in a market where the supply of human capital has never been higher. Ultimately, I found myself primarily thinking of a more thoughtful reading list that I might construct around the flat world.

This book does a good job of describing cataclysmic moments in recent history and how they have democratized everything from news delivery, employment and technology. The author combines interesting corporate tales with anecdotes to keep this tome from being a laborious read.

I think this book represents what is wrong with a generation of baby boomers. Aside from being verbose and arrogant, it presents obvious observations as a favor to the reader, as if the reader is nowhere near as enlightened as Thomas Friedman is. In the process, he manages to name-drop, and attempts to convince us all the world is better by outsourcing. Every turn of the page made my blood boil to a higher temperature, so after nearly 200 pages, I handed it to Tony and instructed him to sell it. I have better things to do with my time.

The flat piece of work was further flattened by the fact that Thomas Friedman thinks to think that his readers' brains are as flat as his metaphor. It's not a particularly complicated concept, but Friedman seems to feel the need to drive it home at least once on every single page. Methinks that the only thing Friedman loves more than his own intellect (any maybe his moustache) is his flat metaphor.

Flatty flatty flat flat flatness flatocity flaticity....

P.S. Flat.