Flatly understated
Ranking Swedish Open Border Lunatic Johan Norberg likes Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” (I’m saddened by the way Creationist-type thinking is spreading), but with some reservations:
Granted, sometimes he is a bit too shallow, you get exhausted by reading about all his “friends” in important places and with his way of substituting slogans and alliteration for deep thought
Friedman? Shallow? Shocking. I freely admit to not having read Friedman’s book, but based on the columns he churns out, I’d say this still seems like a reasonable take.
Update: Some loser insists that the world is round and that history is driven by more factors than just technological advances, like religion and nationalism. What a fogey. But, he makes…sense:
There is no systematic connection between globalization and the free market. It is no more essentially friendly to liberal capitalism than to central planning or East Asian dirigisme. Driven by technological changes that occur in many regimes, the process of globalization is more powerful than any of them. This is a truth that Friedman—as an avowed technological determinist—should accept readily enough. If he does not, it is because it shows how baseless are the utopian hopes he attaches to a process that abounds in conflicts and contradictions. Globalization makes the world smaller. It may also make it—or sections of it—richer. It does not make it more peaceful, or more liberal. Least of all does it make it flat.
