World Is Flat and Globalization to America

World Is Flat: The Impact of Globalization on the United States

In the best-selling book The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman provides a well-researched series of chapters that detail how globalization and the congruency of cultures is making country-level differentiation more challenging to achieve. His contention is that globalization is being caused by the combination of Internet-based technologies and platforms, combined with low-cost labor and higher educational standards in emerging nations (Leamer, 115). Throughout the book he makes a very convincing argument that the United States has lost the ability to compete with its core strengths of intelligence and industriousness, and has become too complacent to the point of having an entitlement mindset (Harvey, Novicevic, et.al.). There are many implications for the United States throughout this book, with two disused below.

Analysis of Globalization's Impact on the United States

The most ironic and impactful examples Thomas Friedman provides in his book is that of telephone operators in India taking classes to learn how to speak and sound like Americans (Leamer, 97). The motivation for this strategy on the part of call center operators throughout India is to gain the trust of American consumers, and have the telephone interchanges be productive ones that lead to higher satisfaction levels. The strategy works well in the scenarios portrayed in the book. Yet as ironic and entertaining as these vignettes are of Indian nationals learning how to speak and sound like Americans, there is the fact that a college-educated Indian considers it an honor to even work in a call center (Leamer, 114). Such is not the case for the typical American who has been college-educated, who has a far higher level of expectation than that, bordering at times on an entitlement mentality. The eagerness of intelligent, college-trained Indian workers to take on what many in America consider menial, even mundane and boring work to get ahead shows how globalization takes the more menial labor jobs that require a limited amount of training and repackages them for 3rd world nations to take on. As Friedman shows in example after example, outsourcing is a very real dynamic due to its effectiveness at re-packaging jobs many American see as menial and below them. This entitlement trap Americans have could cost them even further opportunities in the future if they ignore working in the hopes of a more prestigious position. In reality those prestigious jobs could end up in India or 3rd world nations too.