Saturday, October 15, 2005

The World Is Flat


If you have heard of a person called Thomas Friedman, columist in the , 'The New York Times' , you must be knowing about what i am talking about. Thomas Friendman, is of the most famous columist, dealing with current world affairs. Recently 'The Indian Express' have been printing some of his articles. He also has won two Pultizer Prizes for his coverage of the middle east.
Recently he was also on Shekhar Gupta's show 'Walk The Talk' , for NDTV. He has a theory on globalisation, which is that, no two countries having McDonalds outlets have ever fought war, when he was pointed out about the India Pakistan showdown in kargil , he said that he had upgraded this theory to, no two countries a part of the supply chain will ever fight a war. This is because of globalisation of economies in almost every nation.
His latest book is called 'The World Is Flat', in which he has credited none other than Nandan Nilekani, of Infosys, for the basic idea which the book deals with. What he basically says is, that in the 1980's perhaps if you had a choice of being born in America, China or India, you would have been more than happy with America. But no more. This is because people in India, because of the culture of emphasis on good education, and people in china due to other reasons can now compete with people in America, and perhaps feel confident of beating them. Also companies from developing countries now can compete with thoes in the western countries, implies that the world is becoming a level playing field.


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

India and China are the new big players in the world economy. But one thing you didn't take into account in your comments was shear numbers. The U.S. population is approaching 300million, while the combined populations of China and India is over 2billion. So not only are these two countries able to produce goods at a lower cost, but they also are the worlds largest market of consumers if they choose to be.