Globalization is viewed in many different ways by many people. Some see it as the way of the future, and why not? People are now more interconnected than ever before. This interconnection then propels new forms of cooperation and advancement, creating more opportunities for more people. Then again, some argue that globalization is creating even more inequality than we’ve ever seen at any point in history. The rich, industrialized countries are getting richer as a result of interconnection while the poorer developing nations are suffering.

The world is flat

In 2005, Thomas L. Friedman’s book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century sparked a debate about just how much the world was benefitting from increased globalization. Friedman, a journalist for The New York Times, argues in his book that technological changes have connected the world. He sees this as a “flattening” of the world, as the global playing field is being leveled to include more input and contributions from nations outside the “industrialized West.”

Friedman states in his book that globalization has improved the world. It has allowed more people than ever to work “on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world.” The technology that has allowed people to do this includes computers, e-mail, and teleconferencing. Friedman says that the flattening of the world means that “We are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network.” He says that if politics and terrorism do not get in the way, globalization could usher in an amazing era of wealth, success, and new ideas.

Friedman also describes globalization as going through three distinct stages. Each is driven by a “dynamic force.”

According to Friedman, the first stage lasted from 1492 to around 1800. It begins with Christopher Columbus opening trade routes to the New World. In this first stage, the dynamic force leading to more global integration was what Friedman called “brawn.” It included horsepower, wind power, and steam power, and the ways that countries used these resources. Countries and their governments were responsible for making these changes and driving global integration.

The second stage of globalization lasted from about 1800 to 2000, Friedman says. It was interrupted by the Great Depression and World Wars I and II, but otherwise continued ahead. Friedman says the dynamic force of this era was multinational companies rather than governments. These large companies hired people from across the world and likewise sold their goods all around the world. Friedman says that falling transportation costs helped to drive advancements at the time, “thanks to the steam engine and the railroad.” The second half of this era was powered by falling telecommunication costs. He says this was due to “the telegraph, telephones, the PC, satellites, fiber-optic cable, and the early version of the World Wide Web.” This era marks the time when “there was enough movement of goods and information from continent to continent for there to be a global market,” according to Friedman.

This takes us to the current day. In Friedman’s view, the third stage of globalization is now “shrinking the world” and “flattening the playing field.” The dynamic force of this era is the individual’s ability to work together or against one another globally. The first stage was driven by horsepower. The second was built around hardware. Now it is software that is most important, Friedman argues. New applications and fast internet connections have “made us all next door neighbors,” he says.

The world is spiky¹

Friedman’s theory sounds interesting and persuasive. However, the book received a lot of criticism both from experts in the industrialized world and the developing world. Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, wrote a review of Friedman’s work in The Atlantic Monthly. He counterpunched the flattening world idea by saying the world is actually pretty “spiky” with economic inequality.

“By almost any measure the international economic landscape is not at all flat. On the contrary, our world is amazingly ‘spiky’,” Florida says. In terms of both economic horsepower and creating new ideas, “Surprisingly few regions truly matter in today’s global economy,” he says. Florida argues that the cities and regions that drive the world economy are growing richer while the areas that are left out continue to get poorer.

“The most obvious challenge to the flat-world hypothesis is the explosive growth of cities worldwide,” Florida says. “The share of the world’s population living in urban areas, just three percent in 1800, was nearly 30 percent by 1950. Today it stands at about 50 percent; in advanced countries three out of four people live in urban areas,” he says.

These urban areas have far more wealth than areas with fewer people. Florida says that this fact still understates the spikiness of the global economy though. The 10 largest U.S. cities by themselves have a larger economy than nearly any country on Earth. At the time Florida was writing, Japan and the United States itself were the only countries with a larger economy than these 10 cities. “New York’s economy alone is about the size of Russia’s or Brazil’s, and Chicago’s is on a par with Sweden’s,” he says.

Florida argues that there is a dangerous tension between the world’s growing economic peaks and its sinking economic valleys. “Inequality is growing across the world and within countries,” he says. According to Florida, the end result is a world much more disturbing than the one described by Friedman. It is a world where the divide between rich and poor is greater than ever and more difficult to bridge. “We see its effects in the political backlash against globalization in the advanced world,” he says.

The activist and environmentalist Dr. Vandana Shiva wrote another critique. She writes about how Friedman seems to only focus on the positive effects of technology while leaving out globalization’s effects on inequality.

“The project of corporate Globalization is a project for polarising and dividing people,” Shiva says. People are divided “along axis of class and economic inequality, axis of religion and culture, axis of gender, axis of geographies and regions.” She says that the gap between the many who must labor and the wealthy few who make money without laboring has never been greater. “Never before has hate between cultures been so global,” she adds.

Shiva argues that Friedman’s book looks only at “the worldwide Web of information technology.” It does not address “the web of life, the food web, the web of community, the web of local economies and local cultures which Globalization is destroying.” This oversight is why Friedman makes false and misleading arguments, she says.

According to Shiva, Friedman tells “a one sided story for a one sided interest.” He writes about “550 million Indian youth overtaking Americans in a flat world” due to information technology (IT) jobs. However, Shiva says that IT employs “only a million out of 1.2 billion people” in India. “Food and farming, textiles and clothing, health and education are nowhere in Friedman’s monoculture of mind locked into IT,” she writes. “Friedman presents a 0.1% picture and hides 99.9%.”

Within the hidden 99.9% there are many stories of globalization’s failures, according to Shiva. She cites 25 million women who have disappeared in India. She mentions that thousands of children in India have died of hunger because the public system for giving out food was destroyed to create markets for agribusiness. “The world of the 99.9% has grown poorer because of the economic globalization,” she says.

So which one is it? Is the world flattening or is it spiky? It’s not an easy question to answer. In addition, your perspective, which could include your region, gender, age, and socioeconomic standing, also shapes how you view the world and this issue. Maybe if we take all of these factors into account then we can decide on a more refined approach to answering this problem.

1 Some critics say globalization is “spiky” rather than flat. Others say it is “lumpy”. You might see both terms used throughout this course. They aren’t exactly the same (“spiky” focuses on economic inequality, “lumpy” focuses more on who has access to ideas as well as resources), but they are pretty interchangeable.