The pundit and the money tree.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century - Book Review

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century By Thomas L. Friedman Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 488 pages. $27.50.

In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman came up with something called the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which postulated that no two nations that contain a McDonald's outlet have ever fought each other. The theory fell apart when the United States bombed Yugoslavia.

Not to be deterred, Friedman comes up with a new hypothesis in The World Is Flat, which he names the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention. "The Dell Theory stipulates: No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell's, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain. Because people embedded in major global supply chains don't want to fight old-time wars any more," he states.

The Dell Theory will also quite likely be proven wrong in the coming years, but that won't keep Friedman from extolling globalization's pacifying properties, as he has done over the past many years.

And as in his previous work, Friedman can't resist the impulse to be cutesy. Here he is explaining how cultural conservatives and labor are on one side in opposing globalization, with businessmen and the information industry on the other:

"The Passion of the Christ audience will be in the same trench with the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO, while the Hollywood and Wall Street liberals and the You've Got Mail crowd will be in the same trench with the high-tech workers of Silicon Valley and the global service providers of Manhattan and San Francisco," he writes. "It will be Mel Gibson and Jimmy Hoffa Jr. versus Bill Gates and Meg Ryan."

So infatuated is he with what he considers to be his cleverness that he employs absolutely horrendous metaphors of "vanilla" (representing a regular job), "chocolate sauce" (value-added job), and "the cherry on top" (the ultimate value-added job) to describe occupations in the United States. And he doesn't stop there. "In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears," Friedman writes. "In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears--and that is our problem."

His cheesy style gets in the way of his main point: Technological forces--such as the Internet and outsourcing--have altered the nature of the workplace so fundamentally that they have changed the world. This, Friedman argues, has affected everything ranging from the way you order burgers at drive ups (the orders are often taken at some remote location) to the way cartoon movies are made (teams in Bangalore, India, are frequently doing the animation) to the way computers...