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 leads to more cooperation and new ideas, 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 published his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. It 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. In his view, the global economy is now fairer and allows more input 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 together. People can do “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. “We are now connecting all the knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network,” Friedman says. He says that if politics and terrorism do not get in the way, globalization could usher in an amazing period of wealth, success, and new ideas.

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

The first stage lasted from 1492 to around 1800, according to Friedman. 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. Its dynamic force was multinational companies rather than governments. These large companies hired people from across the world. Likewise, they sold their goods all around the world. Friedman says that falling transportation costs, thanks to the railroads and steam engine, helped to drive advancements at the time. The second half of this period 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 period 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.” In this third stage, the dynamic force is that the individual has power to compete globally. People’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, experts in the industrialized world and the developing world disagreed with many of the book’s ideas. Richard Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto. He 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.

Florida says that, “by almost any measure,” the global economy is not flat. “On the contrary, our world is amazingly ‘spiky’,” he says. In terms of both economic horsepower and creating new ideas, “Surprisingly few regions truly matter in today’s global economy.” Florida argues that a small number of cities and regions are driving the world economy and growing richer. Meanwhile, 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. He points out that today up to 50 percent of the world’s population live in cities. In 1800, it was only three percent. Urban areas have far more wealth than areas with fewer people. He says that even this fact 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 a spiky world is a dangerous world. There is a serious 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 in which the divide between rich and poor is greater than ever. Inequality is now creating a political push against globalization in advanced countries, 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. In her view, Friedman leaves out globalization’s effects on inequality.

Shiva says that corporate globalization divides people. It divides them by class, religion, culture, gender, and geography. 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 has a narrow view. It looks only at “the worldwide Web of information technology.” It does not address “the food web, the web of community, the web of local economies and local cultures which Globalization is destroying.” Shiva says that Friedman makes false and misleading arguments because he overlooks these things.

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 region, gender, age, and socioeconomic standing may shape 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.