The World Is Flat #4

Having a flat world has many potential negative consequences. One being, when you are outsourcing so many of your countries jobs who really is benefiting? On the one hand, it might seem as though it could be very good for both sides, the country who outsources the jobs get the work done cheaper and the consumer gets better products probably for less, and the country being outsourced to gets more jobs with a decent wage for their country and this helps their economy. On the other hand, the country outsourcing the jobs loses jobs for people in it's own country. Also, for an American perspective, how long will it be before we become the country being outsourced to, instead of the big country outsourcing all it's jobs? As we build up their economy with jobs, they won't stay poor countries accepting our low wages. For them this is good and really it is a good thing to help boost other peoples economies, but if this happens, it won't be cheap like it was to outsource to these places, and then where do those jobs go, back to America? And then, will the jobs still be cheap? Or, what if these countries begin outsourcing to us? What will that do to us, and how will we feel then? I think maybe our pride might be slapped around a bit if anything close to that happens.



Another problem is, when countries are expanded and based all over the world it is harder to tell what kind of company it really is and where it's loyalties are. Maybe it is an American company but a lot of the parts are made in China and the company has head quarters in India. It gets rather jumbled that way. Also, it must be harder to tell how your country really is going business wise, because unlike years ago when if businesses in your country were going well your country probably was doing fine, but now a business in a country really doesn't have to have that much to do with the country at all, it could be more involved and important to somewhere else.



Another thing is cheap working employees with bad benefits. It is harder to find out what to do about that. People want cheap products and in order to make them cheaper, in the long run, it seems companies pay their employees less and give worse benefits to do so. The problem is now these employees are have bad benefits and not so decent wages, which is no good, for us to have cheaper prices. But are we really paying that much less? Many of these employees with bad benefits we will have to pay for with our tax money. So what do we do.



A problem that when I was reading I saw as pretty big in my own mind was when Friedman brought up and kept mentioning Karl Marx. Friedman was saying how many of the things Marx wrote about are extremely similar to what he is writing about now. Possibly I am over reacting but when someone starts talking lightly about how what is going on in society today seems very like what a huge communist writer spoke of, a red light comes on. We have all this talk about capitalism, and then Friedman tells how Karl Marx described capitalism as "a force that would dissolve all feudal, national, and religious identities giving rise to a universal civilization governed by market imperatives." What bothered me the most about this was that some of it was things I had already been thinking of that sounded like they were happening and others were things that Friedman seemed to be hinting at. While reading this book I had started to think on my own that it seemed almost like a basically universal civilization would be something not so far fetched. The way businesses are disregarding boundaries and different countries are all starting to use the same products. Also, the way businesses are so important to everything and changing so much the way we live, who is to say that they won't be a serious part of our government? It would seem to me that anything that resembled something Marx had been writing about should be taken very seriously, and it is frightening to think that our world might be headed toward something like what Marx wrote about. People should be taking steps to make sure that our countries don't turn out to the way that people like Stalin, who was a Marxist, made their countries.

Another thing that bothers me is the lack of personal contact. Everything is machines, and technology. The kind of job you get and if you are successful is becoming more and more about how tech savy you are and less about your character and how your people skills are, and just how decent of a person you are. I think it is a little excessive how heavily we rely on our technology. Not to mention there are different kinds of smarts. Repeatedly in this book Friedman states how in order to keep up people will have to be able to move up in the technological world, by having new things to contribute and by thinking up new ways or better ways to do things technologically. Not everyone can do that. It is as simple as that. It doesn't mean that they aren't smart but people have different ways in which they excel. Also, if mediocre jobs keep being outsourced, this could be bad too. Some people need those jobs, we can't all manage businesses or be the head of something. Middle man jobs are needed. It seems to me that if this flat world is going to work, and work for more than one country, or one class of people, many things are going to have to be worked out.