The World is Flattening, But our Metaphorical Tectonics Have More in Store Thomas Friedman New York Times June 20, 2006
At the dawn of the twentieth century, people in the advanced nations lived in global societies. The expansion of capitalism, technology, and political democracy allowed an American company to be sold to financiers in London, with the money received in exchange to be spent on textiles produced in Japan. However, in the twenty first century, individuals truly live global lives. Your typical American citizen can pause his DVD of Amelie to use his Japanese cell phone to call a manager from the Third Italy district to see if the flec-spec command center they ordered for their innovatorium is done being customized. Professor James Kartzengreb, an economist at Columbia University, estimates that interlinkedness among people doubles every three years. "We don't have exact numbers on domestic interlinkedness from 1996" Kartzengreb cautions, but adds that "the level interlinkedness among Americans and Europeans today probably outweighs that the domestic level among Americans a decade ago." The world is of course flattening, but experts are now realizing that its getting smaller as well. Steve Warmerdam, professor of International Relations at Stanford points out that as the world gets smaller, economic tectonic plates must come into contact with and put stress on each other. The end result must of course be mountains. Does this mean that the earth isn't flattening? Warmerdam disagrees. "If we look behind the metaphor, the new mountains arising merely represent shifts in the global economy's commanding heights." While industrial economies were formerly dominated by massive Fordist industries, modern economies now find their dynamism in small, flexible techno-innovatory production sub units. The large masses of semi skilled workers are now replaced by expert technicians. Karl Marx once described the capitalist firm by way of the metaphor of a general leading an industrial army. It is now more appropriate to refer to the most dynamic firms as elite special forces units sub-contracted out to industrial commandos. Of course, the clash of tectonic plates creates Earthquakes. In the 1940s, the legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction" to refer to the process of innovation. As new industries are created, old ones are destroyed. It is up to the government to ease this transition. However, the United states government is still wrapped up in the pre-post-industrial world. The only solution is to begin the quasi-privatization of education so today's innovators can teach the technocrats of tomorrow. The late John Galbraith coined the term "technostructure," which was appropriate for the immediate post war period with Keynesian policy and Fordist production. However, our literature departments are pioneering the way for the technocrats of the future. They will have to run the technopoststructure. I thus propose the merging of engineering and English departments at our universities. Such is the only way that we can have a government appropriate to our flat, shrinking would with rough terrain.
