That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [30]
Here are three random news items that sum up what has happened.
The first comes from the Asian subcontinent. An Indian newspaper, the Hindustan Times, ran a news item (October 30, 2010) reporting that a Nepali telecommunications firm had just started providing thirdgeneration mobile network service (3G) at the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. This, the story noted, would “allow thousands of climbers access to high-speed Internet and video calls using their mobile phones.” Following up this story, the BBC observed that this was a far cry from 1953, when Edmund Hillary first climbed to the Everest summit and “used runners to carry messages from his expedition to the nearest telegraph office.”
You can imagine the phone calls being made: “Hi, Mom! You’ll never guess where I’m calling you from …”
The same month that story appeared, the business pages of American newspapers reported that Applied Materials, the Silicon Valley–headquartered company that makes machines that produce sophisticated, thin-film solar panels, had opened the world’s largest commercial solar research-and-development center in Xi’an, China. Initially, Applied Materials sought applicants for 260 scientist/technologist jobs in Xi’an. Howard Clabo, a company spokesman, said that the Xi’an center received some 26,000 Chinese applications and hired 330 people—31 percent with master’s or Ph.D. degrees. “Roughly 50 percent of the solar panels in the world were made in China last year,” explained Clabo. “We need to be where the customers are.”
Our last item comes from Manama, Bahrain, the tiny Persian Gulf state off the east coast of Saudi Arabia. In the run-up to parliamentary elections, The Washington Post ran a story (November 27, 2006) about disaffected Shiite voters there, which turned out to be a harbinger of revolutions to come. “Mahmood, who lives in a house with his parents, four siblings and their children,” the paper reported, “said he became even more frustrated when he looked up Bahrain on Google Earth and saw vast tracts of empty land, while tens of thousands of mainly poor Shiites were squashed together in small, dense areas. ‘We are 17 people crowded in one small house, like many people in the southern district,’ he said. ‘And you see on Google how many palaces there are and how the al-Khalifas [the Sunni ruling family] have the rest of the country to themselves.’ Bahraini activists have encouraged people to take a look at the country on Google Earth, and they have set up a special user group whose members have access to more than 40 images of royal palaces.” Nearly five years later, Google Earth images helped to fuel a revolution in Bahrain and other repressive Arab states.
The first story tells us how fast and far the network of information technologies that are driving globalization has expanded, just in the last five years. Every day the world’s citizens, governments, businesses, terrorists—and now mountaintops—are being woven together into an ever tightening web, giving more and more people in more and more places access to cheap tools of connectivity, creativity, and collaboration.
The second story tells us that all this connectivity is enabling a whole new category of workers to join the global marketplace. In the process it is exposing Americans to competition from a category of workers we have not seen before on a large scale: the low-wage, high-skilled worker. We have gotten used to low-wage, low-skilled workers in large numbers. But the low-wage, high-skilled worker is a whole new species, to which we will have to adapt.
The third story tells us that these technologies are now empowering individuals to level hierarchies—from Arab tyrannies, to mainstream-media companies, to traditional retail