I used to be a big fan of Thomas L. Friedman, but lately I've decided I got him wrong. At one time I thought he was insightful and enjoyed his bombastic statements. But now I've watched him hop from topic to topic rattling off some "sound bytes" and pontificating then running off to another topic before his mistakes catch up to him.
I don't mind somebody being a "personality" or using "sound bytes". What bothers me is getting analysis wrong and never going back to figure out what made you mistaken. I don't like guys who are instant experts on topics but when reality starts to pop through the busted seams they quickly decamp to set up their soapbox in another fertile field. I've decided that Thomas L. Friedman isn't selling ideas. He's selling himself as selling ideas. Having ideas and selling them doesn't bother me, but recklessly selling ideas which -- when they go bad -- you don't take the time to examine and learn but instead run off and expostulate in a new field and ignore the mistakes. Well, that downright puts me off. I'm tired of Thomas L. Friedman. I gave him his 10 minutes of fame. He needs to get off the stage and stay off the stage because his unwillingness to self reflect and self correct means he isn't worth paying attention to anymore.
This latest book is full of "flash analysis" that I no longer trust. He says silly things like:
Indeed, I believe history will record that it was Chinese capitalism that put the last nail into the coffin of the postwar European welfare state. France can no longer sustain a thirty-five-hour workweek or Europe its lavish social safety nets, because of the rising competition from low-wage high-aspiration China and India. It is hard for France to maintain a thirty-five-hour workweek when China and India have invented a thirty-five hour workday. (pp. 57-58)This is wrong for so many reasons:
- It creates a false dichotomy: either you recklessly pursue wealth and qualify as a "real capitalist" or you will be crushed. That's not true. Europe has never followed the US's rampant consumerism-based capitalism but it hasn't been crushed. They have successfully built a capitalism within a social democratic political system.
- It disrespects his own culture in favour of an illusion: Friedman has written off the Europeans in the past because they didn't emulate the Americans. Now Friedman writes off his own culture because it hasn't embraced a mindless desperate capitalism of China. He is setting up the frenzied two-tier capitalism of China as an ideal, but most working class and middle class American would not embrace the Chinese system as a better future. Sure the US is in tatters and bankrupt because of the crony capitalism rampant in the US under Bush and the ideologues of the Republican party, but most Americans wouldn't give up their present for the idiotic belief that China is a glimpse of a "glorious future". Friedman overlooks the fact that China is a Communist state, a police state where there are no real rights and where the elite that is in charge has no concept of democracy or any vision of a political system that accepts social justice or human rights.
- His bombast is insulting: No Chinese or Indian is working a "thirty-five-hour day". This kind of Stakhanovite theory of economic development is ridiculous. Stalin pushed this on his credulous (and imprisioned) people. Friedman wants to do the same to Americans?
Stay away from this book. Stay away from Friedman. He takes himself far too seriously and he no longer practices responsible journalism, a kind of journalism that respects truth and which admits errors and honestly tries to dig into the truth to get at the real story.
One thing I dislike about the class of people who tell you what you need and what you should do and what you are, they sneer at their followers. Jim Jones had his followers drink Kool-Aid. Friedman wants to tell his followers that if they don't follow his jet set lifestyle, then they aren't fully human:
To go through life without being able to smell a flower, swim a river, pluck the apple off a tree, or behold a mountain valley in spring is to be less than fully alive. Yes, one supposes, we would find substitues, but nothing that could compare with the pristine bounty, beauty, colors, and complexity of nature, without which we are literally less human. (p. 142)If you want to be a true devotee of "green energy" you need to jet set. Yes, that is the formula that Friedman has followed:
Over the past decade, I have traveled with Glenn to some of the world's biodiversity hot spots and other endangered regions where CI [Conservation International] is working -- from the Pantanal wetlands in southwestern Brazil to the Atlantic rain forest on Brazil's coast, from Guyana Shield forest wilderness in southern Venezuela to the Rio Tambopata macaw research station in the heart of the Peruvian jungle, from the exotic-sounding highland of Shangri-La in Chinese-controlled Tibet to the tropical forests of Sumatra and the coral-ringed islands off Bali, in Indonesia. For me, these trips have been master classes in biodiversity, as were my own travels tothe Masai Mara in Kenya and the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania and the vast Empty Quarter of the Saudi Arabian Desert and -- before I had kids -- a rappelling trip inside the salt domes of the Dead Sea. (pp. 145-6)If we all bought tickets and did this trek, there would be no biodiversity left. We would choke the planet. But it is nice that Friedman has taken time from his travels to tell us how much carbon he has expended in "learning" the lesson that we should not waste carbon because it will overheat the planet. I put Friedman up there with hypocrites like Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers, who had his epiphany that we need to cut down on consumption and carbon emission while jetting over the Indian subcontinent and seeing all the twinkling lights from the tens of thousands of Indian villages. He took this "insight" on the road and jetted around the world -- and wrote a book -- telling us all to not do as he does, but to do as he says: stop consuming, cut back, use less carbon. I'm always amazed how the rich and powerful love to lecture the little guy about "cleaninug up your act". The utter hypocrisy galls me. Friedman is a charter member of this group of elect.
Here's an example of his jet-set "green" revolution:This is nutty beyond belief. Currently there are maybe 40 million cultural "wanna be" tourists who tramp through museums, palaces, and churchs in Europe. Friedman is calling for 7 billion green "wanna be" tourists to tramp through the wild places. Nutty! First, what's the point of getting 50 mpg on your subcompact car if you are going to jet off to the far corners of the planet and burn more carbon in one trip than you expend a whole year living you disgraced "non-green" suburban life? Friedman is a fool. Sure, things have got to change, but I suggest the first thing to change is the hypocrisy of the elite telling the poor to "cut back" while they jet set around to shed tears over the eco destruction of the world spewing greenhouses gases on their grand tour. Nutty!
Once you've seen a tropical rain forest in Sumatra framed by lush green rice paddies and garlanded by trumpet flowers, which look just like their name -- pink flowers shaped like trumpets hanging down from every branch of a large bush -- you'll want to save it. Once you've seen the sun rise on the Masai Mara in Kenya and a parade of giraffes walking single file by your camp at dawn, as you shave in the mirror, you'll want to save it. Once you've tramped through the Amazonian rain forests of Peru, dodged by wild boar, and fed macaws from your shoulder at your breakfast table, you'll want to save it. (pp. 315-6)
Here is another example of the idiocy that Friedman is selling. He reminds me of the hippies of Esalen selling their vision of laid back meditation as the "cure" for modern ills. Nice concept, but for the bottom half of the population struggling to put food on the table it was a slap in the face:
When your mind-set shifts to outgreening, said Dov Seidman, "you stop thinking about accumulating more than someone else and you start thinking about innovation." (p. 326)First, most people I know are not into "accumulating more than others". They are into "accumulating enough to have a comfortable, secure life". It is the yuppies like Friedman who are big on accumulating more than others. And this philosophy he is pushing is just one more example of thumbing his nose at others to say "see, I'm one step ahead of you" and "if only you were as enlightened as me, then you could be as green as I am". Second, you will never have more than 1% or 2% of the population seriously into "innovation". It takes special skills and a certain level of wealth to have the leisure and resources to "invent". This paragraph, like a lot of the book, is just pure malarky.
Howlers & typos: Authors & publishers don't proof-read or fact-check books these days:
- Page 135: "...unprecedentedly heavy rains in Iowa caused the Cedar River to flood and overwhelm downtown Cedar Rapids, rising well above thirty feet over sea level -- far, far above whe anybody had ever seen or expected." Odd. Cedar Rapids is 810 feet above sea level according to Wikipedia.
Update 2009jan12: Here is an excellent -- and viciously critical -- review of Friedman's writing by Matt Taibbi. Here's a tidbit where he talks about the previous book The World is Flat:
The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase level the playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:
As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."
What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!
This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting ironically, as it were with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.
Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.
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