Download The World Is Flat [Further Updated and Expanded; Release 3.0]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century epub

The content of the book (the quotes occupy one third of the content!) can be summarized in a few sentences. 1) Computer technologies, automation, and especially the Internet have opened up new opportunities for everyone. We can be rich, we can work together. 2) Free trade and capitalism is the best solution to all the problems of the world. 3) America needs a better system of education. And that's it.

The World is Flat seethes from the excess of demagogy, which makes the author a great candidate for a politician. The content of the book is painfully outdated. Author instead focus on the mechanisms that shape the beginning of the twenty-first century, persistently presents case studies.

Conclusion; if someone wants to scramble through for more than 600 pages to find some valuable comments and bon mots, then I wish you good luck and a lot of patience.

“Yes, the consumer in us wants Wal-Mart prices, with all the fat gone. But the employee in us wants a little fat left on the bone, the way Costco does it, so that it can offer health care to almost all its employee, rather than just less than half of them, as Wal-Mart does. But the shareholder in us wants Wal-Mart’s profit margins, not Costco’s. Yet the citizen in us wants Costco’s benefits, rather than Wal-Mart’s, because the different ultimately may have to be paid for by society.”

The world has changed and it continues to change and not in the notable, transforming ways history has seen before. Governments are not being toppled. Political revolutions are not exploding. But the power is shifting, it is shifting the people.
With the rapid rise of consumer technology, more people are connected than ever before. The world has become much smaller, or as Thomas L. Friedman says, “The world is flat.”

Consumers do not have to rely on the restricted knowledge of real estate agents to find the perfect home, as countless internet sites can show you the entire market. No longer do we have to drive from car lot to car lot to find a great deal on a used car. And no longer do you have to throw on a suit and walk up and down an office building looking for a job. The information has come to the people and the people have changed the game.

Now small companies with little or no capital can become a global player over night. Established companies have learned to adapt and quickly.

The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman is a very interesting read on the changing times. The latest edition of this book was written in 2007, right before the start of the great recession, so it would be interesting to see if Friedman’s thoughts were changed by this major market malfunction.

This book is good but a little long. Friedman includes a lot of interviews and anecdotes, however his stories do not have the power or sharpness of Malcolm Gladwell or the Freakonomics authors.

When this book came out in 2005, it provided many Americans with their first exposure to globalization. It is ironic that the USA has been the dominant player in world affairs since World War II -- political, economic, social, cultural -- but a large portion of the American population was unaware of the centrality of its global role until very recently. Friedman's work has helped them to get a stronger grasp of the forces of globalization, first in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, then in The World Is Flat.
The idea of a world-beyond-nation-state was articulated ten years before Friedman by Kenichi Ohmae in his best-selling 1995 book, The Borderless World. In a sense, Friedman's work can be viewed as an update of Ohmae's because of its focus on recent technological advances in telecommunications, the Internet, computers, and transportation -- technologies that were relatively underdeveloped in 1995.
One problem with Friedman's book is captured in its subtitle: "A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century." Considering that the book was written at the outset of the twenty-first century, this is a pretty arrogant statement. It implies a measure of omniscience in Friedman's outlook. He is predicting how the world will work in the twenty-first century. It turns out that his predictions are largely wrong, because even as the first edition of The World is Flat was coming off the press, the groundwork was being laid for the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. Even as Friedman was praising Carly Fiorina as the "poster girl" of flat world managers, she was on her way out as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. The economic crisis of 2007-2009 demonstrated that as soon as societies face economic downturns, they circle the wagons and reject the openness that Friedman portrays as inevitable. It is interesting that since writing The World Is Flat, Friedman has turned his attention to other arenas: the need for a green revolution (2008) and the decline of the USA (2011). He isn't preaching the virtues of globalization.
In order to understand what Friedman has done with The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat, it is important to recall he is a journalist. He is NOT a sociologist or economist. While he supplies an abundance of advice on how to run a business or government in our brave new world, he himself has never been a businessman or policy maker. As a journalist, he has stood on the sidelines, picked the brains of the real players, then made a fantastic living by offering expert insights and advice.
Having been pretty strong in my criticism of Friedman, I still give his book a score of 3,because in his work -- as a journalist -- he has opened the eyes of thousands of people to important forces that extend beyond what average citizens are aware of.

I haven't even finished the book yet and i'm already regretting not having come across it sooner. This is something that should be required reading in high school, at the least. The book is well written, and the story flows in a nice way (so far at least) that keeps the reader interested. Unless you are some backwards Luddite then I would almost be willing to guarantee that this book will help you to understand the world as it is evolving to be, quite aside from how many people may have seen it coming, or even wanted it to be.