The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

In this final chapter, Friedman focuses on the two dates that he believes were the defining events of the previous 15 years: 11/9/89 and 9/11/01. The former opened the world with the fall of the Berlin Wall, making America the world’s sole superpower. The latter, the day that the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked by terrorists, threatened to close the world again. Friedman writes that the two dates represent “two competing forms of imagination”—creative and destructive (607).

Friedman tells the stories of two men who each created an airline from scratch in 1999. One was David Neeleman, who founded JetBlue, and the other was Osama bin Laden, who drew up plans to attack New York and Washington, D.C. Both men utilized the tools available in a flat world, and Friedman is struck by how much bin Laden and his co-conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resembled a venture capitalist and an engineer-entrepreneur, respectively. Bin Laden was also a deft supply chain manager, outsourcing activities as needed, finding resources, and making payments. Neeleman and bin Laden are examples of creative and destructive imaginations.

To explain how we can encourage everyone to use the flat world’s tools for good, Friedman tells a story from eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman. The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt once called her to discuss eBay’s entrance to the stock exchange, but he also told her about his personal experience selling on eBay and how proud he was to accumulate positive feedback. Whitman realized that everybody—those at both the top and the bottom—desires positive reinforcement. She also tells Friedman the story of a young man with cerebral palsy. His condition was severe enough to keep him from going to school, yet he created a business on eBay that was so successful that his parents quit their jobs to help him run it. Friedman sees the eBay community as an example of a positive context that accepts people from all backgrounds. In short, it is a model for validating people’s worth and preventing humiliation. America can try to foster such contexts around the world to give young people hope.

Friedman also cites a positive example regarding India’s Muslim population, the second largest in the world. It is striking how infrequently Indian Muslims have been associated with the violent extremism produced by the likes of al-Qaeda, he notes. Friedman attributes this to the fact that India is a democracy and an open society. In general, the country is secular and free-market oriented, which provides a societal context that is vastly different from the authoritarian, closed societies that dominate Middle Eastern Muslim countries. As Friedman writes, “While a Muslim woman sits on India’s Supreme Court, no Muslim woman is allowed even to drive a car in Saudi Arabia” (624). (Friedman cites “the curse of oil,” contending that countries that derive their wealth from oil tend to be closed and authoritarian.)

If young people are given a level playing field, opportunity, and some hope, they generally want to contribute to the world instead of destroy it, Friedman concludes. And inspiring young people takes just one good example. The only Arab company to be listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market is Aramex, a Jordanian shipping company. Its founder, Fadi Ghandour, told Friedman that, when the company went public, many employees with stock options said that they felt empowered as part owners and wanted to reinvest their earnings back into the company. Friedman gives another example of inspiring people. In India, he met a businessman named Abraham George, who founded both a journalism college and a primary school. What made the latter special was the fact that its students were all part of India’s untouchable caste. Friedman visits the school and is both inspired and moved by what he sees. The children are being educated so that they can escape the discrimination they face in their own country and find success elsewhere. George and the teachers are changing the students’ context and their imaginations.

Friedman concludes the book by encouraging young Americans to step up to the challenges of a flat world:

While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11, the world needs you to be forever the generation of 11/9—the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things can be better but also acts on that imagination every day (635).