Flat (2006), Thomas Friedman Describes the New

¶ … Flat (2006), Thomas Friedman describes the new global capitalist economy and how it has affected the United States, as well as the type of skills and education that will be most in demand in the 21st Century. Even white-collar workers, managers and engineers have been doing poorly because of globalization, while unskilled and semiskilled blue-collar workers have been devastated. Construction and manufacturing workers with only a high school education have been losing ground in wealth and incomes to the elites for the last thirty years. This era has been far better for the creative and imaginative designers of new technologies than those performing routine tasks. For the last ten years, the majority of Americans were surviving through inflated credit, mortgage and asset bubbles, but when these collapsed in 2008-09 their true economic situation became stark. Friedman's main thesis is that those workers with flexible, adaptive, creative skills who can understand the new technologies and learn to work as part of a global team will thrive, while those trapped in the old economy will continue to experience diminished living standards and find their jobs either outsourced to Asia or to the past. Friedman is certainly correct that this has been occurring for the last thirty years, although he underestimates just how unpopular the process has been in the United States, especially because it has been designed of, for and by elite groups to benefit themselves and often in a highly undemocratic manner -- a problem that has been getting worse in recent years.

In a 'flat' or globalized world, everyone is part of an international supply chain, with buyers and sellers in many countries. Those who cannot think globally will not survive, since every young person in America is now in competition with their peers in China, India and Brazil, even if they never see them in person (Friedman, p. 278). Friedman makes the same point that those who survive best in this world have specialized professions and niches that cannot be easily duplicated by computers of low-paid workers in China and India. People like Madonna, Michael Jordan, brain surgeons and cancer specialists cannot be outsourced or automated. They are the new 'untouchables', but they are only a small minority of the world's population (Friedman, p. 282). Those who can work comfortably in teams as part of large, multinational organizations will also thrive in this new system, such as the North American employees of an Indian firm like Infosys. So will creative writers, editors, organizers, explainers and synthesizers of information and ideas, such as those who can explain digital photography and other new technologies. America once had a "deep and broad middle class" and both its democracy and political stability depended on it, but this middle class has been shrinking for decades (Friedman, p. 284). Its education system was designed in the early era of industrialization and mass production, and simply is not preparing young people for this new, global economy (Friedman, 2009, NY Times). It will have to train flexible, adaptable workers who are prepared for new technologies that will rapidly phase out old jobs, not simply narrow specialists or shallow generalists (Friedman, p. 297). As billions of people from Asia start to move into the middle class, there will also be many more green jobs involving sustainable and renewable use of resources, along with jobs that provide personalized services in local markets that cannot be outsourced. Mathematicians who can organize the mountains of data about customers on the Internet into useful models are also in high demand (Friedman, p. 301). New computer graphics technology has radically changed art and design, made it a field not just for specialists but for anyone with the right computer software (Friedman, p. 305).

Friedman is correct that the older mass production and white-collar jobs have been outsourced to low-wage countries in the last thirty years, but he underestimates just how unjust and unequal this process has been, and how devastating for those in the bottom half of American society. He also underestimates the very real racism and structural inequalities if education and economic life, which have worsened greatly recent years. Racism has always been related to other social and economic problems, especially poverty, police brutality, social class and lack of economic and educational opportunities. From the early-1970s, poverty and inequality in wealth and incomes have also increased, and this affected blacks more than any other group. By 2000, 1% of the population had almost half of the wealth in the United States. Police abuse and violence in the segregated ghettos increased and was "disproportionately used against poor communities of color" (West, 1993, p. viii). Nearly 10% of young black men were in prison and 40% of black children lived in poverty, but this was hardly part of the national political agenda (West, p. 4). Blacks consumed about 12% of the drugs in the U.S. But were 70% of those convicted on drug charges (West, p. xii). They were also imprisoned all out of proportion to their actual numbers in the population. Even educated and middle class blacks frequently experienced discrimination and racial profiling in everyday life, from taxis that refused to pick them to being frequently stopped and searched on the highways (Driving While Black) and commonly suspected of theft and shoplifting (Shopping While Black). White America only noticed this occasionally, such as the riots that occurred in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Rodney King.