The World Is Flat

Currently i am reading a book called " the world is flat " for thomas freedman. The book is a best seller on amazon and was recommended by some freinds. The main stream of the book is discussing the global economical changes in the world and how the world has now a flat market of suppliers, producers and consumers with the factors that helped the world to be that flat. The factors includes the fall of communism, the pc's revolution, microsoft software, the internet and the net browsers, the new powers as india and china, the outsourcing, the offshoring......

Though the book states alot of facts and is full of usefull information and drives the reader attention to the huge changes going in the global market, but i had the feeling that it is biased towards capitalism as a wining economical system. he is talking about industrial giants with great admire and enthusiasm. How china now started to adopt the free market choice after joining the WTO ( world trade organization) and that it had no choice but that, which is very much true. And how is that brining a new era to the world, the chinese era. One part that took my attention is his stating for a statement written on the floor of one of the factories in china, that we are either lions or gazals, the lions every day morning start runing to over take the slowest gazal, and the gazals every day morning start runing to escape the lions, the point that every day morning we have to start runing, whether we are lions or gazals.

This statement stopped me alot and made me think, this is the rule of the jungle, the strong eats the weak, and the fast overtake the slow. but we are HUMANS. And i started to think that the mentality the writer is a result of the environment he was raised up at. An environment based on feirce capitalizm, free market, economical super powers and the most important, extremely consuming socity.

That is what it is realy all about, they want to convince us that this is the only model, that we were born to consume and consume till we die. Great trailer giants has to be there to have more less prices to consume more, should move to india and china as they are huge markets with very cheap labour, so less prices and more consumption. No modesty.

I believe the topic is quite huge and for sure lots of books are written about it, but i am just stating my simple impression while i am in the middle of the book. That something is wrong, we shouldnt apply the jungle laws on our selves, we need modesty in consuming. Super powers and economical giants should not be alowed to allow for small businesses to survive and thus better spreading of fortunes rather than having hundereds of millioners and millions of poor. fair trade must be applied between poor countries and rich super powers, and because you are poor and weak, you cant state the price of your products, because you dont have the choice of selling it your self, ethiopia has to sell its coffee very cheap to costa and starbuks because they are the super powers who set the price, even if it is unfair.

It is a system that is just making the rich more rich and the poor more poorer, and driving the world crazy consuming, i believe we should be modest and we shouldnt live as lions or gazals, we should live as humans. Fair and honest.

Waleed Elmasry.