At the heart of Friedman’s error is a lack of justice and a confusion about human nature. Most people are not would-be managers or flexible entrepreneurs prepared to change careers every two or three years. People work to live, to support their families, and to feel useful and productive. A decent human being is concerned when anyone loses his job and doubly so when that person is his countryman. And it’s simply unrealistic to expect people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s to retool for new careers. But, hey, it’s important entire regions of America (and the world) are impoverished so that Friedman can have a Starbucks latte with Indians in Monteverde or wherever he is this week. ~Chris Roach

But I’m sure Friedman will shout: the world is flat, and so is Uruguay!  At which point I suspect the Uruguayans will kindly ask him to leave for insulting their fine mountains.  This is what Friedman actually said about Uruguay:

The New Yorker once ran a cartoon by Peter Steiner of two dogs, with one sitting at a computer keyboard saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

Nobody also knows you’re Uruguay.

Um, not to be too geeky about this, but aren’t there routers and IP addresses that tell people things like this?  But more basically, did Friedman just compare Uruguay to a dog?  Did one of the local patriots smack him in the face for this insult to national honour?  I hope so.  I honestly have no idea what Uruguayans might have to be proud of, and they must have something, but comparing someone’s country to a dog is just poor form. 

I am not sure, but the average Uruguayan probably has about as much sympathy for the Uruguayan Round of GATT as the average West Virginian, which is to say not a whole lot.  Perhaps the near-collapse that Uruguay suffered in the wake of Argentina’s default (one of those small unfortunate incidents that followed upon Argentine embrace of the Great Whore of Neoliberalism) soured the locals on Friedman’s starry-eyed mentality of “Globalisation is to bright I have to wear shades made in Indonesia by child labourers and ordered online through a Nigerian server.”  It also cannot be very comforting for computer engineers in this country to read that Indian corporations have started to outsource their own computer engineering jobs to Uruguay–next stop on the Flat World Express, Namibia.  Have broadband, will not travel.  One will instead facilitate an ever-more dislocated, uprooted world that moves concrete, real-world industries to ever-poorer countries and pawns expendable, easily outsourced service jobs off on the rest.   

Chris takes Friedman apart with ease and skill in this post.  It is a pleasure to read, and I strongly recommend it to all.