It’s A Flat World, Or Is It?

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Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, a personal account of the challenges and benefits of globalisation, has just won the inaugural Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

But Stephen Roach, writing in yesterday’s Morgan Stanley GEF, doesn’t agree. For him the world is ‘hardly a flat one‘.

With all due respect to Tom Friedman, there’s nothing flat about this unbalanced global economy. The image of a “flat world” is most appropriate for the endgame of globalization. In my view, that ideal state is decades into the future — if that. In the meantime, the global economy is distinguished far more by its disparities and tensions — and how the resulting imbalances are likely to be vented in world financial markets

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About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".

One thought on “It’s A Flat World, Or Is It?”

  1. On the risk of giving him more credit and attention than he deserves: Friedman is a complete idiot. An emotionally immature man looking for a deity. A clown to entertain us with his boyish belief in whatever Walter Disney cartoon he has been watching yesterday.

    The economic world is multidimensional and several dimensions are in complete and utter disrepair. The fact that I’m alive strictly by the grace of the remnants of ancient socialist influences should be somewhat indicative.

    There I am, a vibrant INTJ with an IQ of well over 200, 42 years of experience and maybe wisdom, trapped in a construct where I am being discarded and reanimated up to the point of over a 1000 job applications per annum. Overqualified, underqualified, misqualified. Only to be requalified when there would be a guarantee that does and cannot exist in this world. I could shout or cry, and once every not so often I certainly do, but in this “flat world” my perspective is the vortex that pulled me in and keeps violating my most sensitive parts. I sure am feeling “flatter” than ever before.

    Friedman is a complete idiot.

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