The Untouchables, Article Critique Example

How the World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, by journalist and scholar Thomas Friedman, was first published in 2005, and updated with a new addition two years later. The book is (obviously) aimed at a world readership, but the sixth chapter, The Untouchables, is part of the section entitled America and the Flat World. In it Friedman rhetorically talks to Americans. He first asked a question: What do we tell our kids? The answer, he says, is that they will have to “work a little harder, and run a little faster”, to keep their standard of living rising. In the rest of the chapter he explains why this is so, and how they can successfully do so, starting with this instruction to his young daughters: Finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs. That’s how to reach the goal. The goal itself is to be “untouchable.” If you aren’t, your job may go somewhere else, especially if it is fungible: convertible into binary code with no input from you, which code can be sent to or originated from some other county. Friedman cites China and India above because they are seen as avatars of the dangers to us and opportunities for us in the brave new flattening world.

The Untouchables is itself divided into sections, the first entitled Finding the New Middle. Friedman is referring to the new middle class, new in the sense of being reasonably secure within the new model of global commerce and government: updated versions of Ozzie and Harriet. There are three types of untouchables: the special and specialized people: the stars of art (Madonna, J.K. Rowling, etc), business, and science, latter examples being top brain surgeons and cancer researchers. The second bunch are “localized,” or “anchored.” Here he mentions people who are not stars: your barber, nanny, carpenter, repairman, dentist, lawyer — people who’s pay is determined in the local market. The third category is of former middle class–earning jobs that are now under stress from lower-priced foreign labor. Kids should do homework that will enable them to become great collaborators and orchestrators, synthesizers, explainers, leveragers, adapters, “green” persons, passionate personalizers, versatile “Swiss Army Knife” persons, and (if possible) math lovers. Each term comes with an example encountered or described by Friedman, of people successfully collaborating, explaining, etc.

The problem with books like this is that they get out of date too quickly, and potentially undermine their credibility. That is at least partially the case here, and I suspect the reason a new edition was published was to catch up on the Facebook wave, (although he mentioned MySpace first, as if it were still important player on the scene, demonstrating the essential futility of trying to keep a book based on current events up to date). Friedman wrote that thanks to China buying $1 trillion in U.S. bonds, homebuyers have access to very cheap mortgages, but those mortgages aren’t cheap anymore. He stated that the U.S. “doesn’t have large-scale unemployment, despite the flattening of the world.” It had it a year later (Google, 2012). He said that “Dell’s value is its ability to synthesize much better than everyone else.” Dell’s stock value is now almost half of what it was when Friedman’s new edition came out (Dell, 2012). Did the Chinese stop buying U.S. debt? Did the world flatten so fast that American’s lost millions of jobs overseas in the space of a few years? Did Dell stop synthesizing better than everyone else? The answer is No to the first two questions, and Probably Not to the third. What happened was that there was a real-estate bubble, and Friedman was no better than China, the U.S. government, and Dell Computer in seeing it coming. The second group of local untouchables mentioned earlier have lost their jobs and their houses. They are now in the same boat as the third group — those whose jobs have already left for cheaper labor overseas. Once books like this hit the library, they are dead.

Friedman offered a lot of long range strategic pointers in this chapter to keep your job in the flattening world, but he didn’t talk about learning a foreign language. It’s interesting to speculate on this point. If you are an American student contemplating a career in international business, it would be worth asking yourself if it would be cost effective to devote a large portion of your time and energy to learning a second (or third, or fourth) language. But having decided to give it a try, which language are you going to take on? Following Friedman’s repeated mentioning of China and India as the frontier of the flattening world, you would have to choose between Mandarin or Standard Hindi. But which? Unless you are planning to be a journalist based in one of those two countries, or to live there in business for an extended period, you will probably decide that as an English speaking American it would not be cost effective at all. And that is because the Indians and the Chinese have already made it their cultural business to learn English, pretty much like the rest of the world has or is. Maybe the world flattened for them first.

Friedman described in detail the career path of Marcia Loughry, how she quit college and went straight to vocational night school and ended up the author of a Dummies book for a Microsoft application. A check of her LinkedIn page shows she is at all appearances doing fine, and it even mentions her walk-on role in Friedman’s book (Loughry, n.d.). He described how her ambition combined with random opportunities created an entirely unpredictable career path, both in its details and in her seemingly unlikely survival. But what Friedman implied (Loughry went along with it) was that what she did, she did simply to survive, to desperately stay employed in an ever-changing ripe-tide of a job market. There was an element of that, but what she almost certainly also got was promoted, making more money at each step. She didn’t say so, but I suspect that money was the reason, at the end of her interview, that she still had not gotten her college degree: getting it would have lowered her earnings without assuring her more later.

Again, Friedman asked, what to do? and answered, Obviously, we need to make sure our tax system is fair, but I will leave that for others to detail. He left much else to those “others.”

References

Dell Inc. (2012). Retrieved from http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=DELL+Interactive#symbol=DELL;range=5y

Google. (2012). Public Data. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore? ds= z1ebjpgk 2654 c1_&met_y=unemployment_rate&tdim=true&fdim_y= country: US &fdim_y=seasonality:S&dl=en&hl=en&q=unemployment+rate#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=unemployment_rate&fdim_y=seasonality:S&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:US&ifdim=country&hl=en_US&dl=en

Loughry, M. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcialoughry