The butterfly effect

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I love book excerpts. Like film trailers, they offer up the juiciest bits from potentially marginal titles. Here’s a good one from NYT columnist Tom Friedman’s latest, The World is Flat. Hedge (fund) hog and sound bite artiste Dinakar Singh compares minds to perishable inventory in dockside godowns:

”India had no resources and no infrastructure… It produced people with quality and by quantity. But many of them rotted on the docks of India like vegetables. Only a relative few could get on ships and get out. Not anymore, because we built this ocean crosser, called fiber-optic cable. For decades you had to leave India to be a professional. Now you can plug into the world from India. You don’t have to go to Yale and go to work for Goldman Sachs.”

”… the railroad overinvestment was confined to your own country and so, too, were the benefits,” Singh said. In the case of the digital railroads, ”it was the foreigners who benefited.” …That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight.

In Friedman’s butterfly formulation, the Global Crossing bankruptcy let IIT kids enjoy both cash and kachoris. It’s the global version of ‘work in your pajamas’: enjoying family, festivals and food at home.

8 thoughts on “The butterfly effect”

  1. Of course, it’s still only a relative few who can “get out” — while a significant percentage of people in India now lead lives that could be anywhere in the world, a much larger percentage remains untouched by any of the benefits that have accrued to these privileged elites.

  2. I have to go on a rant because Thomas Friedman bothers me so much (and it’s the Internet, home of the rant): before I take anything that Thomas Friedman writes without a huge grain of salt, I want a full apology for everything he’s written since From Beirut to Jerusalem, which I thought was good. As a “Global Affairs” commnentator, the man has an utterly naive way of looking at the world. He ends up doing a real disservice to the issues (and by implication, people) he writes about as well as his readers. Read Nicholas Kristoff instead, who actually does reporting. As far as I can tell, Friedman, hangs out with global elites and thereby formulates preposterous ideas like international investors being the salvation of the world’s poor and promoting a new kind of global democracy.

    I’m basing this primarily on Friedman’s columns and what I’ve read about his ideas, as I haven’t read Lexus…. I know I should do so before going off on a rant, but I think it would probably temper my judgements, which would be no good (see above: “Internet, rants on”).

  4. Please.. I am a rotting vegetable with only coconut husks to keep me company – won’t you place me in your american refrigerator, so someday, if I am lucky, I may experience what it is like to be dipped in some ranch dressing? Maybe, you can carry me in a ziploc bag through the malodorous subways of nyc and perhaps I can nostalgically rekindle my fondness for bhangra music in a Sikh taxi on 5th avenue. Oh, I can only dream; but, my karma mandates that I be eaten by a stray dog or cow and reborn as a postule on britney spear’s forehead.

  5. Source of the problem (or wake-up call?) has been rightly identified in NYtimes article:

    These are some of the reasons that Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, warned the governors’ conference in a Feb. 26 speech that American high-school education is ”obsolete.” As Gates put it: ”When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. In math and science, our fourth graders are among the top students in the world. By eighth grade, they’re in the middle of the pack. By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. . . . The percentage of a population with a college degree is important, but so are sheer numbers. In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind.”

    Friedman, however, is not exclusive to recognize this. Even a undergraduate student in US with Indian high school diploma can recognize it.

  6. One important factor that Friedman and others miss out is that political situation in India was exactly suitable for its success. The BJP was working hard to get possible penny invested in India. If you neglect some of the development goals that BJP neglected (like non-urban, poor) it did a pretty good job.

    Other political parties would not have been able to take so much advantage of the situation as did the BJP. It fact, opportunity has always been there but Indian beuraucracy oops… democracy was never so open, thanks to communist mentor’s of the Gandhi dynasty.

  7. Meeting the challenges of flatism requires as comprehensive, energetic and focused a response as did meeting the challenge of Communism. It requires a president who can summon the nation to work harder, get smarter, attract more young women and men to science and engineering and build the broadband infrastructure, portable pensions and health care that will help every American become more employable in an age in which no one can guarantee you lifetime employment.

    Oh well, not with our current commander in chief…

  8. Yeah, I’ve never met anybody who makes judgements based on the photos on a dating site before!