The World Is Flat... Which Is Why We're All Falling Off the Edge

So lately, as I’m sure you’ve heard, there’s been this whole “financial crisis, the sky is falling” going on. As I mentioned a few weeks back, I’m really not attuned to economics. Don’t get it. Don’t understand it. It gives me a headache.
Last week, I picked up “The World Is Flat” and though I’ve only made it through the first hundred pages or so, I have to admit that coupled with this article, http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/11/11/opinion/11herbert.html?s=1&pg=4, I am extremely discouraged.
I am discouraged not only about the economy, but about people’s blatant inability to see past the ends of their own noses… and about the supposed “intelligence” of our international media.
Coming from a background in heavy-duty historic scholarship, I’ve always found journalistic writing a little, hmm how to put this, analysis-lite. “The World is Flat” is a perfect example of this. Essentially, the argument boils down to the idea that because of the Internet and world-wide communication strategies, individuals can now compete against individuals for jobs, instead of laboring under the old time “nation competes against nation” or “company competes against company” frame. The author backs up his thesis… over, and over, and over again… by visiting Elysian-like structures in Bangkok, Tokyo, and parts of China. He pushes… over and over again… that young Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and Russians (haven’t gotten to the part if he mentions Latin Americans at all) can finally compete for jobs at big companies with Americans, because of the magical Internet. And, you see, outsourcing isn’t because of greed. No, no, silly. It’s because individuals can finally now test their abilities against people all across the globe, and Asians just happen to be better at math, better at science, better at computers, better educated, more motivated, politer, and just more gosh darn efficient than Americans.
The author conceives that all of this individual competition is a good thing, because it means the more competent and talented individual gets the job he or she so richly deserves, and it can give generic college-educated Asians a leg up into the middle class. He also alludes that this is a good thing for Americans, because it will force us to be better at math, better at science, better at computers, etc. in order to simply survive in the world. And people are always at their best when competing, am I right?
The author is so excited at his own brilliance (that he can boil down complex economic and social issues into four words) he never really addresses how having a flat world might not be such a hot commodity. The thinking might have gone that the book won’t sell if he takes his own theory apart, but that’s analysis-lite for you, and I’m only speculating.
Ironically, he does allude to one of the largest issues that make a “flattened world,” at the moment, impossible, repeatedly. The issue is unsurprisingly, wages. In interview after interview with company presidents or managers or owners or what-have-you, the spokesperson makes sure to stress that the real reason jobs such as accounting, journalism, even secretarial duties, are being outsourced is that there people over in the other hemisphere are simply smarter, and want it more. A Microsoft executive mentioned how they had thousands of applications in their Chinese branch for software programming, and they simply gave the job to the guy with the highest IQ. You see? He’s just smarter than you, that’s why he got the job. It’s individual competition at work.
At almost every location he visits, however, the author makes a point to describe the wages each worker is getting, and how many Indian workers it takes to screw in a lightbulb, compared to how many American works. Unsurprisingly, it takes about five to twenty Indian workers for every American worker. The price of living in India is so staggeringly cheaper than America, that companies can not only pay a telemarketer a handsome salary of $600 a month, but afford insurance for the entire family. Additionally, because most of a telemarketer’s customers are American, since they work for predominantly American companies, they can work at night and still attend school or work another job during the day.
It isn’t surprising the author skirts this issue, because if he were to directly confront it, his entire thesis would fall apart. An American worker must ask for a higher wage to survive in a society of higher incomes… created by business owners, who live in the United States, and spend all the profits their company makes outsourcing driving up the cost of living. The world is not flat. Competition between individuals is not even, and is not based on merit alone. It’s based on money.
Unintentionally I believe, the author also ignores directly discussing something that nearly screams out from every sentence. Whether discussing how much more motivated Chinese students working for a Japanese outsourcing company are by learning Japanese, or how Indian students constantly go back to college to improve themselves, and citing that age-old urban legend that every other country in the world constantly outperforms Americans on the essentials of life (math and science, naturally), the author never addresses.. ethnicity. Or, if you want to be sloppy about it, race. The closest he comes is suggesting that learning is more valued in Asian societies, which is why Asian-American students outperform their Caucasian American peers in math.
Every country the author sets up as a front-runner to inheriting the American business empire is Asian (small quibble: yes, Russia is usually considered part of Europe, but it is hanging around on the Asian continent as well.) The author also rarely holds these countries up against scrutiny beside other Western nations like the United Kingdom or Australia or France. It’s always Asia, in some form, against the US.
This makes sense in an economic frame. America is considered the Goliath of business. Countries like India and China are often heralded in the media as the under-dogs, the scrappy competitors.
With my partiality to think “culture” in everything I see, I noticed that India, China, and Japan also have a striking similarity besides geographical location; they are, by and large, racially homogenous. According to the CIA World Fact book, China and Japan both boast an ethnic minority population of less than 9%, and India is compromised of two ethnic groups that make up 97% of their population. Only Russia’s 79% Caucasian compares to the United States 80%; however, Russia’s minority groups total about 4, while the United States have 5 to 6, including more interracial citizens at 1.61%.

*Note: On the CIA website, minority ethnicities listed under China actually number around 8 or 9, but they are all grouped together because each group only compromises about 1%.

As you can see, Japan, China, and India all boast an impressive homogenous makeup. Russia and the United States are by and large similar, but this is only percentages. As we’ve seen in recent months in India, as the Hindus (80%) burn, threat, and maim the Christians (2.3%), religion can be a volatile factor as well.
In “The World Is Flat,” the author emphasizes that individuals in India, China, and to a lesser extent Japan (to the point Japan has started outsourcing to China) are merely more competent in subjects he claims the American education system no longer bothers with; math and science. But he never goes fully into depth with the educational system in either China or India; the most he mentions as at a college level, is a president insisting history majors take several courses in computer science as well, to make them more “employable” (which, as you can imagine, I deeply resented.) He simply laments with the old line about “bad teachers in poor schools,” “bad test scores” and “no one-except Asian Americans-caring about math anymore.” Gosh, this is turning into a long book review, and this is only with 100 pages under my belt. Of course, that isn’t too much of an issue, since the author goes over the same… material… again… and again. This is why journalists should stick to writing two page articles that require little in depth explanation, general presumptions unsupported except by “personal observation,” and dripping with an inability to see the other side of an argument.