Flatism

Thomas Friedman is once again ahead of the curve, and created the word "flatism" to describe the new world economy. His article in the Times is worth the twenty minutes it takes to read. Some exerpts...

It all happened while we were sleeping, or rather while we were focused on 9/11, the dot-com bust and Enron... which is why it's time to wake up and prepare ourselves for this flat world, because others already are, and there is no time to waste.

We have been slow to rise to the challenge of flatism, in contrast to Communism, maybe because flatism doesn't involve ICBM missiles aimed at our cities. Indeed, the hot line, which used to connect the Kremlin with the White House, has been replaced by the help line, which connects everyone in America to call centers in Bangalore. While the other end of the hot line might have had Leonid Brezhnev threatening nuclear war, the other end of the help line just has a soft voice eager to help you sort out your AOL bill or collaborate with you on a new piece of software. No, that voice has none of the menace of Nikita Khrushchev pounding a shoe on the table at the United Nations, and it has none of the sinister snarl of the bad guys in From Russia With Love. No, that voice on the help line just has a friendly Indian lilt that masks any sense of threat or challenge. It simply says: "Hello, my name is Rajiv. Can I help you?"

This quiet crisis is a product of three gaps now plaguing American society. The first is an ''ambition gap.'' Compared with the young, energetic Indians and Chinese, too many Americans have gotten too lazy. As David Rothkopf, a former official in the Clinton Commerce Department, puts it, "The real entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement."

As Gates put it: "When I compare our high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they're in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations..."

So parents, throw away the Game Boy, turn off the television and get your kids to work. There is no sugar-coating this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living.

Friedman's call for education, ambition, and competition among Americans is, for whites, the corrollary to Bill Cosby's call for a straightening-up among black Americans. All of us have gotten a little sloppy, and if we want to eat, we're going to have to earn it. I've long said that my generation is the first that can't reasonably expect to do better than its parents - but it's also true that mine is just the second generation of Americans that doesn't expect to work hard.