The World Is Flat : A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Friedman Thomas L

Author:Friedman, Thomas L. [Friedman, Thomas L.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2007-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

The Right Country

So if these are the jobs and the pathways to the new middle, how well suited is America generally, in this flattening world, to creating these jobs and paving these pathways? The short answer is that we have—in theory—all it takes to produce the jobs and educate the sorts of people who will thrive in a flat world. Yes, we really do.

Let’s go down the list. To begin with, we have a relatively flexible, deregulated free-market economy, with lots of experimentation and competition between states and universities—like Georgia Tech. The general flexibility of the American economy is a huge asset, at a time when constant change is required to stay competitive. So far America has not succumbed either to economic protectionists, who want to put up walls to keep jobs in, or national security protectionists, who want to keep workers out. As Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina once remarked to me, the one thing we can’t do is try to “protect our way to prosperity.”

It is essential that we stay as open and flexible as possible. America’s cultural willingness to tear things down and rebuild them anew gives us an enormous advantage in the age of flatness, when you are required to tear down and build up more often to achieve innovation and growth. We made the transition from agriculture to industry, and then from industry to services. Now we need to go to the next phase, which is services delivered globally. Each of these transitions was wrenching in its own way, but we were able to accomplish each faster and more efficiently than any other major economy because we were open and flexible and let the market do its work—which it did, though not without pain for plenty of people. The transition to the flat world will be particularly wrenching because it is likely to touch many more white-collar workers. Nevertheless, this is no time to freeze up.

“You [Americans] have all the things you need to get your people from the old middle to the new middle,” said Nandan Nilekani of Infosys. “If you get through this transition first, you will be kings of the hill…[But] if people lose their nerve and protectionists come along and start building walls, you will [fail]. It is an act of faith—you have to believe that it will happen.”

Underneath this umbrella of flexibility, America has a myriad of institutional strengths. It starts with a network of research universities, which spin off a steady stream of competitive experiments, innovations, and scientific breakthroughs—from mathematics to biology to physics to chemistry. “Our university system is the best,” said Bill Gates. “We fund our universities to do a lot of research and that is an amazing thing. High-IQ people come here, and we allow them to innovate and turn [their innovations] into products. We reward risk taking. Our university system is competitive and experimental. They can try out different approaches. There are one hundred universities making contributions to robotics. And each one is saying that the other is doing it all wrong, or my piece actually fits together with theirs.

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