The World Is Flat After All Essay

Globalization has changed the means for international innovations and competition by increasing both resource availability and communication between countries. Now, people in developing nations are able to participate in the global economy and contribute to advancements of humanity alongside developed regions. Several conversations on the impacts of globalization have surfaced, including Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat, After All” and Richard Florida’s “The World is Spiky.” Both arguments have valid connotations; however, Florida’s more comprehensive regional evaluation of globalization’s impacts is more plausible than Friedman’s ideology that all nations are able to equally participate in global economic endeavors. The conversations

Thomas Friedman believes that the world is now flat, meaning that anyone can freely contribute to the world’s expanding economy, while Richard Florida claims the world is spiky and still controlled by a few countries. Within “The World is Flat, After All,” Friedman states that different phases of globalization have increasingly shrunk the world, allowing more people to capitalize on resources needed to compete in the global market (2005, p. 34). He cites the world’s increasing connectivity to several major events: first, the falling of the Berlin Wall, followed by the release of Microsoft 3.0 and Netscape that lead to the dot com boom and workflow revolution (Friedman, 2005, p. 35). Because of these events, people across the globe can now collaborate and share vast amounts of knowledge that were not previously attainable for all. Friedman claims that this has allowed countries like India and China to compete with more developed nations, thus flattening the world (2005, p. 36). In contrast, Richard Florida claims that there is still a separation of power despite globalization in his publication “The World is Spiky.” He divides the globe’s countries into three tiers that he calls peaks,