“In a 2007 Foreign Policy magazine article, Pankaj Ghemawat (professor at Harvard Business School), argued that ninety percent of the world’s phone calls, Web traffic, and investments are local, suggesting that Friedman has grossly exaggerated the significance of the trends he describes: “Despite talk of a new, wired world where information, ideas, money, and people can move around the planet faster than ever before, just a fraction of what we consider globalization actually exists”.[2][3]
However, criticizing the relatively small number of participants engaged in international trade fails to note their significance as witnessed by UNCTAD’s Handbook of Statistics 2008. A mechanism that exemplifies this enters into action when a global trader makes a phone call to India to order a product - this first call generates potentially hundreds more local phone calls to make and sell the product.
The book is perceived to be written from an American perspective.Friedman’s work history has been mostly with The New York Times and this may have influenced the way in which the book was written - some would have preferred a book written in a more “inclusive voice”.[4]
Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has also been critical of Friedman’s book. In “Making Globalization Work”, Stiglitz writes:
Friedman is right that there have been dramatic changes in the global economy, in the global landscape; in some directions, the world is much flatter than it has ever been, with those in various parts of the world being more connected than they have ever been, but the world is not flat […] Not only is the world not flat: in many ways it has been getting less flat.”
