come right to the main point of this review: Thomas Friedman's brilliant catch phase, book title and powerfully developed new thesis — "The World is Flat" — is yet another reaffirmation of what Bahá'u'lláh said about 150 years ago when He declared that “The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.”
That's not to say there is nothing new in Mr. Friedman's latest book. The World Is Flat is a wide-ranging examination of how trends and technologies like freedom, the Internet, and open-source software are converging to make it possible for educated people everywhere to compete with the best and the brightest in North America and Europe . And that is changing everything, for people everywhere, much more quickly than had been previously imagined.
Mr. Friedman, a Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for the New York Times , says the convergence of these trends and technologies is “flattening” the world. They create a “level playing field” where companies and individuals now successfully compete in the global market regardless of location.
Mr. Friedman is by now an acknowledged expert on globalization, having outlined its impact in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree . There he argued that globalization had become “the dominant international system at the end of the twentieth century — replacing the Cold War system…”
