http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/266/


The world is getting amazingly flat. As I read his book, and as I was listening to his speach I couldn't help but nod my head and agree. I notice a lot of the same things that he is talking about. Personaly I deal with people all over the country, some that I have never meet but am able to conduct business with them. The field of real estate investment has been transformed from a local undertaking to a global. No longer can you only work with people, and do deals in your city or state. But I can work with someone in the midwest who I have never met, on a deal in South America. It just amazes me to no end that at least in my industry very few people are talking about this and realize it. The entire playing field has changed, yet people are concentrating on interest rates, the NAR's lawsuit, etc.

This is happening so fast its amazing. My favorite saying is "kids do your homework because there are a bunch of kids in China and India that want your job."

The entire business playing field is changing, and its changing at a rapid pace. Understanding these changes are vital in todays world.

Thoughts?

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My thought is, you got to read T. Friedman between the lines as well.

You want a Real Estate deal in South America?
What kind of a commision do they charge these days?

After taking a sneak peek preview on the subject .... It's just what I thought.
You got to have a handful of Pulitzers under your belt to revive the old "The World is Flat" ideology, even if it's only as a headliner.

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link is not working

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No offense but that doesn't make any sense? Please expand. You didn't even watch his talk since the link is dead. Did you read his book?

Commision, no commision I'm not selling anything.

The link works now.

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You were asking for thoughts.

My remark on South American Real Estate deals refers to the hidden side, describing it "Commission Charges".

I am as familiar with Mr. Friedman as I possibly can be, his articles appear in many different papers besides NY-Times.

He is, IMO, nothing more then a "Globalization Guru", whereby his views are too biased for my providing not enough detail on actual progression.

Without wanting to belittle his works, but essentially he is a 'pencil-warrior' rewriting developments that are already known.

The link, as expected, didn't provide anything groundbreaking, there is a multitude of material out there coming from him ...like I said.

So, don't take it personal, it's got nothing to do with you.

Here is my hint:

Reading is just as well an art, as writing!

Writers are praised for their work on a daily bases. Who recognizes accomplished readers?

What I am trying to get at is, you can sharpen your reading skills and your sense for what is written to such a degree, you will end up understanding more than the writer originally may have intended.

So, the goal is to get smart and recognize, even those folks cook only with water.

On top of it, to headline a subject on globalization with "The World is Flat" is a gimmick to me ...

...but again, those are just my thoughts and my opinion.

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I'm not sure what you said, but I'm against it.

B

Yep.

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I am not sure what you are asking about? In some countrys you need to have a broker involved(NAR down there btw), but their commission is but a small percentage of the profits. What countries are you currantly invested where hidden "commission charges" are eating your profits?

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I thought Friedman's book was brilliant for the way he clearly and simply built his case, showing us how seemingly unreleated issues are part of a larger movement and showing us a roadmap for a potential future if we don't get wise now. I read it not too long after reading Jared Diamond's Collapse and felt the two books made very good companions, showing us where there world is heading as India and China vie for the lifestyle they've seen us Westerners enjoy for the last 60 years.

Even if it was just taking developments that were already known and putting them into a single book, he was able to illustrate the issue with clarity in a simple progression that shows a bigger picture at work. That's where the brilliance lay, as far as I was concerned. The World is Flat is a book that literally blew my mind because what he was saying was so simple yet largely ignored. I found it to be a bit of a epiphany.

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I felt the same way while reading his book. He connected the dots, which I had not done myself up until that point. As I was reading and he was talking about the Flateners I kept thinking, oh wait I do that, or I read about that in the WSJ, or such and such a company does that. He connected all the dots, and drew the big picture, it was a bit of a euraka moment for me as I was going through it. All of a sudden a lot of stuff starts to make sense when its looked at in this context. My economics professor back in freshmen year had some similer thoughts on outsourcing and the global economy.

His thoughts on the currant war on terror and interesting, and provide an interesting point to consider as well.

I think his book should be required reading for everyone in school. He may be wrong, but he may be correct, his point is valid and everyone should know a bit about it.

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Why am I not surprised?

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Friday, December 01, 2006

The Tom Friedman disease consumes Establishment Washington

(updated below)

Someone e-mailed me several days ago to say that while it is fruitful and necessary to chronicle the dishonest historical record of pundits and political figures when it comes to Iraq, I deserve to be chastised for failing to devote enough attention to the person who, by far, was most responsible for selling the war to centrists and liberal "hawks" and thereby creating "consensus" support for Bush's war -- Tom Friedman, from his New York Times perch as "the nation's preeminent centrist foreign policy genius."

That criticism immediately struck me as valid, and so I spent the day yesterday and today reading every Tom Friedman column beginning in mid-2002 through the present regarding Iraq. That body of work is extraordinary. Friedman is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country.
Yet he is, of course, still today, one of the most universally revered figures around, despite -- amazingly enough, I think it's more accurate to say "because of" -- his advocacy of the invasion of Iraq, likely the greatest strategic foreign policy disaster in America's history.

This matters so much not simply in order to expose Friedman's intellectual and moral emptiness, though that is a goal worthy and important in its own right. Way beyond that, the specific strain of intellectual bankruptcy that drove Friedman's strident support for the invasion of Iraq continues to be what drives not only Tom Friedman today, but virtually all of our elite opinion-makers and "centrist" and "responsible" political figures currently attempting to "solve" the Iraq disaster.

In column after column prior to the war, Friedman argued that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was a noble, moral, and wise course of action. To Friedman, that was something we absolutely ought to do, and as a result, he repeatedly used his column to justify the invasion and railed against anti-war arguments voiced by those whom he derisively called "knee-jerk liberals and pacifists" (so as not to clutter this post with long Friedman quotes, I'm posting the relevant Friedman excerpts here).

But at the same time Friedman was cheering on the invasion, he was inserting one alarmist caveat after the next about how dangerous a course this might be and about all the problems that might be unleashed by it. He thus repeatedly emphasized the need to wage the War what he called "the right way." To Friedman, the "right way" meant enlisting support from allies across Europe and the Middle East for both the war and the subsequent re-building, telling Americans the real reasons for the war, and ensuring that Americans understood what a vast and long-term commitment we were undertaking as a result of the need to re-build that country.

Only if the Bush administration did those things, argued Friedman, would this war achieve good results. If it did not do those things, he repeatedly warned, this war would be an unparalleled disaster.

Needless to say, the Bush administration did none of the things Friedman insisted were prerequisites for invading Iraq "the right way." And Friedman recognized that fact, and repeatedly pointed it out. Over and over, in the months before the war, Friedman would praise the idea of the war and actively push for the invasion, but then insert into his columns statements like this:

And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won't be able to do it right.

More here:

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/12/tom-friedman-disease-consumes.html

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Just off press ...
The World is Flat?
Watch a thought-provoking 13 minute Overview on the Web:
www.mkpress.com/FlatOverview.html

Thomas Friedman’s recent New York Times bestseller, The World is Flat, asserts that the international economic playing field is now more level than it has ever been. As popular as it may be, some reviewers assert that by what it leaves out, Friedman’s book is dangerous.

“The world isn’t flat as a result of globalization,” say Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo, business analysts and authors of a critical analysis of Friedman’s book. “It’s tilted in favor of unfettered global corporations that exploit cheap labor in China, Indian and beyond.

Today’s global corporations go to the ends of the earth to employ factory workers for 20 cents an hour and PhDs in science and technology for $20,000 a year,” add Aronica and Ramdoo. In short, “Globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution,” says Aronica.
This epic change has shaken up the way the world does business, and Americans are reluctantly facing a shift of wealth and power to the East. Across the country, a growing number of Americans fear that they could be replaced by someone from a developing country. Recent polls indicate that millions of Americans are preoccupied with the outsourcing of American jobs and the threat of global economic competition. From boardrooms to classrooms to kitchen tables and water coolers, globalization has become a hot topic of discussion and debate everywhere. But by what Friedman’s book ignores or glosses over, it misinforms the American people and policy makers.

Aronica and Ramdoo’s concise monograph, The World is Flat?: A Critical Analysis of Thomas L. Friedman’s New York Times Bestseller, brings clarity to many of Friedman’s stories and explores nine key issues Friedman largely disregards or treats too lightly, including the hollowing out of America’s debt-ridden middle class. To create a fair and balanced exploration of globalization, the authors cite the work of experts that Friedman fails to incorporate, including Nobel laureate and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, Dr. Joseph Stiglitz.

Refreshingly, readers can now gain new insights into globalization without weeding through Friedman’s almost 600 pages of grandiloquent prose and bafflegab. “It’s of utmost urgency that we all learn about and prepare for total global competition.
If you read Friedman’s book, and were awed, you really should read more rigorous treatments of this vital subject.
Globalization affects all our lives and will be of even greater significance to our children and grandchildren,” says Ramdoo.
Aronica and Ramdoo conclude by listing over twenty action items that point the way forward for America and other developed countries. They provide a comprehensive, yet concise, framework for understanding the critical issues of globalization. They paint a clear and sometimes alarming picture of the early twenty-first century landscape, and present timely information needed by governments, businesses, and individuals everywhere.

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A few more excerpts:


The meeting was entitled "A Flattened World Hits Home" and billed as an effort to apply the lessons of author Thomas Friedman's free-trade bible, "The World Is Flat," to the rural outpost of Montana. Friedman himself could not be there, the panel moderator told us - the town couldn't afford his $75,000-a-speech fee and first-class plane ticket. But we would just watch a video of a recent lecture the author had given.
[snip]
...As the New York Times columnist rattled off the wonders of technology - "Isn't Linux great?" "Wireless is the steroids of the flat world" - the group was dead silent as it listened to an enthusiastic and joyful Friedman telling the story of how, thanks to a "flat" world brought on by America's "free" trade policy, our country's workers and small businesses must now compete with slave labor and desperate conditions in places like China and Bangladesh.
Then it was time for panel discussion. How would our community deal with the "flat world" that Friedman gushed about?
[snip]
...All said exactly what Friedman said at the end of his videotape: "Kids need to learn how to learn" in order to compete in the "flat world."
Sadly, the hard data tells us that, as comforting as this Great Education Myth is, we cannot school our way out of the problems accompanying a national trade policy devoid of wage, environmental and human-rights protections.
As Fortune Magazine reported last year, "The skill premium, the extra value of higher education, must have declined after three decades of growing." Citing the U.S. government's Economic Report of the President, the magazine noted that "real annual earnings of college graduates actually declined" between 2000 and 2004. The magazine also noted that new studies "show companies massively shifting high-skilled work -- research, development, engineering, even corporate finance -- from the United States to low-cost countries like India and China."
It's not that workers in these other countries are smarter, says Sheldon Steinbach of the American Council on Education. "One could be educationally competitive and easily lose out in the global economic marketplace," he told the Los Angeles Times. Why? "Because of significantly lower wages being paid elsewhere."
Pundits, such as Friedman and the Washington policymakers who follow him, see the data and understand this reality, and yet continue preaching their "free" trade fundamentalism to the delight of corporate lobbyists whose clients' profits are expanding under the status quo.

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Last week my column was a parody of how Thomas Friedman writes about the global economy. Since then, I've learned that I was in error on a matter that shines some light on the worldview of the syndicated New York Times columnist and best-selling author.

I work for a newspaper run by guys who are even richer than I am," the satirical version of Friedman said in my article. "Let's face it -- at this point I'm a rich guy"
But actually, Friedman is not just "a rich guy."

Days ago I read a long feature story that appeared in the July issue of The Washingtonian magazine. It provides some background on the world of Thomas Friedman -- and the personal finances that have long smoothed his path.
Much of Friedman's emphasis in recent years has revolved around economic relations. He's been a strong supporter of "globalization": the international trade rules and government policies allowing corporations to function with legal prerogatives that routinely trump labor rights, environmental protection and economic justice.

"Globalization" is largely about relations between the rich and the poor -- and often that means the very rich and the very poor.

The lengthy profile of Friedman in The Washingtonian this summer had scant ink to spare for criticisms of Friedman's outlook -- which corporate media outlets frequently hail as brilliant.
But the article did include a telling comment about him from the renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz, who said: "Participation in the new world requires resources, computers, education, and access to those is very unequally distributed. He has this high level of optimism that means that anyone can do it if they just have wills."
Stiglitz, a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, added that Friedman has understated the impacts of "some of the forces of inequality."
And Stiglitz pointed out that "globalization inherently increases the inequalities in developing countries."

Friedman's great wealth is a frame for his window on the world. The Washingtonian reports that "his annual income easily reaches seven figures." In the Maryland suburbs near Washington, three years ago, "the Friedmans built a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million," on a parcel of more than seven acres near Bethesda Country Club and the Beltway.
Throughout his journalistic career, Friedman has been married to Ann Bucksbaum -- heiress to a real-estate and shopping-mall fortune now estimated at $2.7 billion. When the couple wed back in 1978, according to The Washingtonian article, Friedman became part of "one of the 100 richest families in the country."

Does Friedman's astronomical wealth invalidate what he writes? Of course not. But information about the extent of his wealth -- while not disclosed to readers of his columns and books -- provides context for how he is accustomed to moving through the world.
And his outsized economic privileges become especially relevant when we consider that he's inclined to be glib and even flip as he advocates policies that give very low priority to reducing economic inequality.

Supposedly rigorous about facts and ideas, Friedman has prostituted his intellect. During a CNBC interview with Tim Russert in late July, the acclaimed savant made a notable confession: "We got this free market, and I admit, I was speaking out in Minnesota -- my hometown, in fact -- and guy stood up in the audience, said, 'Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you'd oppose?' I said, 'No, absolutely not.' I said, 'You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.'"
Friedman went on: "Why am I so obsessive about that? Because it is a free, open, flexible economy that means you really gotta compete, but that you really can compete and you can really be quick in responding. That, Tim, is the most important asset we have."

Tim Russert didn't bother to pursue the fact that one of the nation's leading journalists had just said that he fervently advocated for a major trade agreement without knowing what was in it.

"But beyond Russert's negligence," David Sirota wrote at the time, "what's truly astonishing is that Tom Friedman, the person who the media most relies on to interpret trade policy, now publicly runs around admitting he actually knows nothing at all about the trade pacts he pushes in his New York Times column."

It's reasonable to ask whether Friedman -- perhaps the richest journalist in the United States -- might be less zealously evangelical for "globalization" if he hadn't been so wealthy for the last quarter of a century. Meanwhile, it's worth noting that the corporate forces avidly promoting his analysis of economic options are reaping massive profits from the systems of trade and commerce that he champions.

"Thomas Friedman is arguably the world's most influential and popular foreign-policy thinker," The Washingtonian reported. If so, he may be a prime example of the unfortunate effects of "globalization."

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