The World is Flat — Audiobook Giveaway
The Other Side of Outsourcing is a Discovery Channel documentary by Thomas Friedman on high-tech outsourcing to India. In it Friedman visits a call centre in Bangalore to interview the young Indians working there, and then travels to an impoverished rural part of India where he debates the pros and cons of globalization with locals.
This spawned his eventual best-selling book, The World is Flat, which is now being given away as an audiobook.
Annoyingly you have to sign up for a newsletter which will send it to you in 3 parts, but if it’s as good as The Lexus and the Olive Tree or Longitudes and Attitudes, this is a good way to get the book legitimately.
Edit: No need to sign up; the serialised book is on this ‘hidden’ page.
1 Comment
I dont think Friedman has any doubt about the pros of globalization, it is the cons, that he writes less about! Ofcourse since all his “friends” are the big corporate bosses, who are the sole winners in globalization as we see it today, he doesnt have to bother about the rest of the 3/4 population, who are not benefited by it.
Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel winner for Economics and former Cheif Economist at the World Bank) said while on a trip to India, that 600 million people from India out of the one billion!) have been left out of the “development” fold of globalization. So, obviously, all India is not going to migrate into middle class, if anything the inequality is far, far worse now, after the advent of globalization. Similarly newspaper reports have pointed out how Chinese workers are working in apalling conditions, to chhurn out the low cost products, with poor pay, cramped rooms, no accident or health insurance benefits, no job security, no overtime, long working hours.
I would much rather the discourse on Globalization came from economists like Joesph Stiglitz , Paul Krugman (Princeton), Pankaj Ghemawat (Harvard)etc. Ted Koppel interviews Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz, latter ofcourse doesnt find a mention in Friedman’s book!
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/opinion/25friedman-transcript.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
There is a small, but interesting book, by Aronica and Ramdoo, “The World is Flat? A Critical Analysis of Thomas Friedman’s New York Times Bestseller,” which offers a good counterperspective to Friedman’s. It is a small book compared to the 600 page tome by Friedman, and aimed at the common man and students alike. As popular as the book may be, some reviewers assert that by what it leaves out, Friedman’s book is dangerous. The authors point to the fact that there isn’t a single table or data footnote in Friedman’s entire book.
“Globalization is the greatest reorganization of the world since the Industrial Revolution,” says Aronica.
You may want to see http://www.mkpress.com/flat
and watch http://www.mkpress.com/flatoverview.html
for an interesting counterperspective on Friedman’s
“The World is Flat”.
Also a really interesting 6 min wake-up call: Shift Happens! http://www.mkpress.com/ShiftExtreme.html
There is also a companion book listed: Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation
http://www.mkpress.com/extreme
http://www.mkpress.com/Extreme11minWMV.html