In an extended direct quotation that is among the book’s many illuminating moments, Sandel cautions Friedman: “A flat, frictionless world is a mixed blessing. It may, as you suggest, be good for global business. Or it may, as Marx believed, augur well for a proletarian revolution. But it may also pose a threat to the distinctive places and communities that give us our bearings, that locate us in the world. … Some of these inefficiencies are institutions, habits, cultures, and traditions that people cherish precisely because they reflect nonmarket values like social cohesion, religious faith, and national pride.”

Friedman’s rejoinder is that, from an American perspective, one can legitimately perceive outsourcing as exploitation of cheap foreign labor but that the flat world may require trading one person’s unemployment for another’s economic liberation. But, confined so closely to his economic mode of analysis, Friedman has replied to a vastly different trade-off than the one Sandel posited. The critical issue is not merely to whom economic benefit is allocated at whose expense, but also to what extent it should be pursued at all in the face of competing claims.

To his credit, Friedman moves on to discuss briefly the depersonalization that a frictionless, expansive, highly technical–i.e., “flat”–world may impose. He risks triviality, however, by steeping the discussion in Americana, evoking Willy Loman and citing a real-life struggling Minnesota wholesaler. Friedman’s pal the wholesaler may have a legitimate complaint that he can no longer “stop by the office, give the buyers a few Vikings’ tickets,” and maintain a friendly rapport with his customers. But the wholesaler’s grievance seems frivolous compared to the sense of disillusionment and dislocation felt by citizens of the developing world who see traditional culture eroded by globalization.

Here Friedman’s effort to link his analysis to American popular culture seems like a stretch; later it becomes downright offensive. He writes: “Bin Laden is to the Arab masses what O.J. was to many American blacks—the stick they poke in the eye of an ‘unfair’ America and their leaders.”

Perhaps we can acquit Friedman for this sentence that doesn’t fit. But we cannot let him off the hook for his more serious transgression of reducing globalization to business. In totality, “The World is Flat” is an amusing demystification of multinational corporations and consultant-speak. But it falls short of a forceful theory of a new age characterized by the equal access of diverse populations to the global economy. In the end, if the world truly is flat—whatever that really means—then its two dimensions are one more than Friedman’s analysis possesses.

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Meatless

Friedman recounts a conversation with friend Ken Greer, who runs a small media company being squeezed by competition from larger advertising firms. The passage illustrates one of the most frequent criticisms of Friedman’s writing—that he privileges cute anecdotes over meaty analysis:

“Ken said something that really hit home with me: ‘It’s like they have cut all the fat out of the business’ and turned everything into a numbers game. ‘But fat is what gives meat its taste...The leanest cuts of meat don’t taste very good. You want it marbled with at least a little fat.’ The flattening process relentlessly trims the fat out of business and life....”