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Opinion
Staying Middle Class (Or Don’t Cede Any Century to a Country that Censors Google)
7/12/2006
Remember when you had to have a travel agent do your ticketing for air flights? That was Globalization 1.0.
When you could go online and make your own reservations, that was Globalization 2.0.
When you now can go online and print your own boarding pass, that’s Globalization 3.0. The process has flattened out to where you, the customer, are what Friedman jokingly called “an unpaid airline worker; or even a paid one.”
Basically, Friedman wrote The World Is Flat, so that his children could read it and understand what he had lived through when they were young. And the changes have affected, or will soon affect, the lives of nearly everyone.
Friedman shared a friend’s story of whether you would prefer to be a “B” student in Poughkeepsie, NY, or an outright genius living in rural China. He says that 35 years ago, that was a no-brainer. If you had the choice, you would choose to be the “B” student in New York. Nowadays, it’s not so clear. In fact, it’s probably better to be the genius in rural China than the “B” student in New York and, in fact, “B” students all over the world may be in trouble.
Why? Because the world is now flat. If you have the idea and the energy, you can connect with this new horizontal, collaborative world and make things happen from anywhere. A downside for Americans is that the societal roles/jobs that used to provide a solid middle-class living for Americans in a bell-jar-type distribution are changing so quickly that our society is threatened with a “dumbbell” distribution. We face a class of rich folk, a class of poor folks, and a skinny dumbbell distribution of middle class.
What to do about this has occupied his thinking since the book was published, and he is coming out with an addition to the book soon. That addition takes a look at the idea of “more education is needed, but what kind of education? And with what jobs in mind for the educated?”
Friedman did not give any solid, concrete answers, but he d'es place what he calls jobs that can anchor a person in the middle class in this new flat world. (With appropriate implications for higher education.) He has eight categories (not counting people with incredible artistic or other talent, like musicians and athletes):
Great Collaborators: More and more things done by global supply chains (think Walmart). The last time he visited Bangalore, he was surprised to find that the CEO’s reference to “Infosys” interns who wanted to meet him was to American interns working in India. In fact, these smart kids were the select few with internships selected from among 9,000+ applications, mostly from business school students who knew that they’d get a leg up in their employment searches if they could demonstrate experience at international, horizontal collaboration.
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