The Changing Times: The World From 1990-2000

               Thomas Friedman authored an extensive book that gave homage to globalization and actually illuminated an otherwise abstract concept to many people in a book called The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty First century. The book won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award; reflecting its business orientation. Friedman argues that there are forces in the world that have brought what conceivably is viewed as a world full of barriers to one where those barriers no longer exist; in other words the world has become flat. He writes about the ten “flatteners” that made the world flat and with each “flattener” provides an extensive report to show its relation to the previous “flattener.”

                       The first flattener, which marks the beginning of globalization, was the fall of Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 (Friedman 52). The Second flattener was the rise of the Internet, which Friedman calls The Age of Connectivity: When the Web Went Around and Netscape Went Public. The connectivity that the age of the internet brought in has not only changed the world in obvious ways such as communication; but it worked as a bouncing board for making areas such as business very efficient and relatively faster( Friedman  60). The Third flattener is Work Flow Software which is the basic structural easiness with which companies have come to take advantage of a flat world; the connectivity of supply chains in a company that has its software manufacturing in the United States but its main consumers in a different part of the globe is an example (Friedman 77).  The   fourth flattener that made was Uploading, which led to a more heightened level of sharing data within an organization, community, country and the world (Friedman 93).  

                                The fifth flattener is Outsourcing which inevitably leads to not only external interactions with the world but also leads to the division of labor that is comparatively efficient.  The outsourcing of jobs to places like India, Bangladesh and South Africa had a tremendous impact on the overall flatness of the world because the jobs connect the employees as well as employers (Friedman, 126). Off shoring comes in as the sixth force accentuating the “flat world” where companies take a whole factory that was operating in a place like Detroit and take it to a place like Brazil where factors of production might be cheaper and less expensive (Friedman 137). The seventh flattener is   Supply –Chaining; with an example such as Wal- Mart with its global supply chain (Friedman 151). The eighth flattener is Insourcing which is an extreme form of outsourcing where a company that is in a different type of business- like UPS, a traditionally a shipping company, repairs Toshiba laptops in their factors and ships them back to the Toshiba customer (Friedman 167).  At ninth place is In-forming which reflects the access that Google, MSN and other search engines have increase the dissemination of information;  this allows a child in   Cambodia to search in Google, and if  using the same search word, actually see the same information as a child in America ( Friedman 179).  The tenth flattener is The Steroids which is a more hardware orientation to information dissemination: by using pocket computers such as HP’s pocket PC or Blackberries individuals are still connected to the world as well as their work and the thin line between work and home is blurred. 

                    The ten flatteners provide a picture in which foreign investments in Botswana and Zambia were occurring (Friedman 185).  The Friedman flatteners provided the structural change of the world that allowed for the movement of capital, which had already been happening in the previous years but in this specific time was accentuated by globalization; and, though this change has been viewed to make people worse off or other people better off, there has been overall gains to the way the system has now been structured (Bhagwati 2004).