New York Times op-ed columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman recently wrapped up a week-long trip to India, where he met with business executives, government ministers and other officials, entrepreneurs and development groups. Even as India’s economy has slowed considerably, Mr. Friedman remains a big believer in what he calls the “miracle of India.’’
Earlier we asked India Ink readers for their questions for Mr. Friedman about India’s changing role in the world economy. Here are his answers to a select few:
By far the most popular reader question was: Is the world still flat?
I wrote the “World Is Flat” in 2004.
I have to confess, I now realize the book was wrong. The world is so much flatter than I thought.
When I wrote “The World Is Flat,” Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking place, LinkedIn was a prison, applications were what you sent to college, Big Data was a rap star and Skype was a typo. All of that came after I wrote “The World Is Flat.”
And so what it tells you is all those trends have actually taken us from a connected world to what we’re now in, which is a hyper-connected world. It’s a difference of degree. It’s a difference in kind.
I believe it is changing every job, every industry and every market.
The trends I identified have only intensified in every direction, enabling individuals to complete, connect and collaborate so much faster, farther cheaper and deeper.
Venkat from N. J. said: The globalization of business is basically finding a way to justify exploitation of labor, resulting in an enormous concentration of wealth in fewer hands. The majority of labor working for low-end manufacturing work in pathetic conditions, while workers in the U.S. face layoffs, particularly the elderly. Who is paying for this social cost, and should globalization be regulated, somehow?
The first thing you need to understand about globalization is that it is everything and its opposite. So it is take it with one hand and give it with another hand.
On the one hand it is automating more things faster. On the other hand I met with young Indian entrepreneurs who are leveraging the cloud, open-source tools and very small amounts of capital, and are able to invent companies that can complete globally like never before.
So, who is the exploiter and who is the exploitee in this system? If horses could vote, there never would have been cars.
What we’re getting here is rapid change. The question the reader raises, though, is a very important one, because something has changed which we have not figured out how to adjust to. This is a point that Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make in their book “The Race Against the Machine,” which I wrote my last column about.
The point they make is that over the last 200 hundred years, three things grew together: productivity, median income and employment. Whether you were an Indian or an American, productivity grew, median income grew and employment grew, and inequality tended to shrink.
That’s a good thing.
Once we hit the flattening of the world, and now the hyper-flattening of the world, those three things are splitting apart. And that’s what the reader is, rightly, concerned about.
I’m concerned about it too.
So what happens when the world gets this hyper-connected? Well, first of all, the returns to education grow enormously. To be able to use these new technologies properly, you need to be educated.
In America today, unemployment for people with four-year college degrees is 3.6 percent, basically nothing. Unemployment for someone who dropped out of high school is now infinity. I exaggerate but you get the point.
It’s called skills-bias polarization.
If you want to have a factory job in America today, doing high-end manufacturing, you need to know algebra and calculus. It’s not just a repetitive motion any more, you need to program the robot.
Second thing is the returns to capital are so much more than the returns to labor. If I have a lot of capital and I can buy a lot of machines, the returns are so much more than if I hire a lot of people.
The third thing causing this phenomenon is in a hyper-connected world, the returns to superstar talent are just staggering. If you are, say, Madonna, well, every Indian kid who has an iPad can now download your songs. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago. You couldn’t reach this market.
So all three of these things are creating much bigger income gaps, much lower employment for people with lower skills, yet much higher productivity and great wealth for owners of capital.
That’s the big change.
The challenge for every developed and developing society is how do you maintain a middle class in such a world. That’s what I’m thinking about for the topic of my next book.
D.C. Agrawal from Princeton, New Jersey, asks: “How would you rate India on governance and public institutional structures compared to other democratic countries?’’
Let’s look at the countries I visited in the last six months: India, China and Egypt. India in my mind has relatively weak governance in terms of delivering services, but a very strong civil society — very vibrant active, social movements, whether it’s Anna Hazare or reaction to the rape case.
China has a very muscular government, in terms of delivering infrastructure and education, but a very weak civil society, although it is getting stronger. And Egypt has a very flabby, overweight government and a very weak civil society. That’s why when the government collapsed — you got the Muslim Brotherhood taking advantage of the revolution, not strong-rooted democratic movements.
I think India’s governance will improve. The government here is not utterly ineffective. It does do some things very well, but clearly it has weaknesses around policing, infrastructure building and providing consistent education. It holds elections very well, it does the census very well.
Let’s remember it is still a billion people. I don’t want to be too hard on it, but people want more, they want better.
India today has, because of hyper-connection of the world, and diffusion of technology, experienced the pushing down to lower and lower income levels more technology empowerment and education. That’s why India today seems like it has a 300 million-person middle class and a 300 million-person virtual middle class.
These are people who now have available to them, whether it’s a cell phone or other technologies, things that you would normally have to have a middle-class income to have. And they have access to certain learning opportunities.
So they’re actually in their minds middle class, thinking like middle class and putting middle-class demands on the government. I think the young woman who was raped in this terrible tragedy was a member of that virtual middle class – the tools she had, what she was doing, expectations of the government.
That’s a big change. It’s putting more pressure on the government. And the government will eventually respond because it has to.
Jason Richardson-White from Bethlehem, Georgia, said: Studies indicate that equal treatment between the sexes is important to slowing the birth rate. I don’t see that globalization is contributing significantly to that end in India. An argument can be made that globalization has made it possible for the people who are most likely to start egalitarian families to leave India for the West?
First let me make a general response:
I did not invent globalization. I promise you. I just wrote about it.
I wrote about the upsides and the downsides. I didn’t start it and I can’t stop it. I have my own problems with it.
Having said that, I profile in my column an N.G.O. that is providing cell phone-based SMS messaging to alert women about their menstrual cycle, on when exactly they are fertile and when they should not be having unprotected sex, if they want to do family planning.
This is totally based on cloud computing. Without globalization it doesn’t exist. It allows a woman in a remote place to do this. There’s privacy to it. You do one interview on the phone to set it up.
People need to keep in mind, globalization giveth and globalization taketh. The biggest revolution about to hit India, in the next two years, is distance learning. Any woman from any village who knows English will be able to take courses from Harvard, Stanford and M.I.T.
Do you know what this means for women in conservative families, who don’t want them to go to school? It’s going to be a revolution. I’m very excited about the kind of educational empowerment that is going to be coming the way of Indian women that will give them greater earning power, greater control over their own bodies and greater ability to negotiate with their sexual partners.
Anand Kumar from Chicago, Illinois, asks: Tom, China may not be loved in the West, but is respected and admired for its accomplishments. How do you think India ranks on the loved vs. respected and admired spectrum?
What an interesting question.
I think India’s brand remains very strong around the world. I appreciate India’s democracy.
What if 1 billion 50 million Indians were living like Syria today? The whole world would be different. Literally, the whole world would feel different today.
So to me India is a miracle. One billion fifty million people holding free and fair elections, just about every day, in the country. We now take it for granted because it has gone on for so long. I think it’s amazing.
I can’t generalize about the whole world, but I’m still enormously optimistic about what I see here.
Zaigum Kashmiri from Clarence, New York, asks: Tom, I know you are an Indophile and write great things about India. But, honestly, how can anybody be hopeful about India’s economic and social progress, keeping in view the lawlessness, dysfunctional government, corrupt police, a huge incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy and poverty?
I think the important thing to always remember when you look at India is not the snapshot, but the slope of the change.
If you take a snapshot, those will be some of the things you see.
But if you came with me to my meeting with NASSCOM [National Association of Software and Services Companies, India's technology industry association] this week, you’d see eight young entrepreneurs leveraging the flat world to start global businesses that not only contribute to the world but that make Indians unpoor.
They’re amazing.
So you always have to keep these things in balance. What excites me most about India today is the trend line. Every time I come here, I see more and more Indians starting things, collaborating on things and inventing things to make Indians unpoor. And to me that’s the most important thing you have to keep in mind.
By the way, everything the reader cited there, you could say that about America. We have all that, plus guns.
No country is a paradise. Everyone is a work in progress. You have to think about where the thrust is.
I’d like to think that with all our problems in America, we’re still tilted in a positive direction. I’d like to say the same about India.
(Interview has been lightly edited and condensed.)
