The world isn't flat anymore

While The web isn't flat anymore is one of the slogans of Apture, the startup I co-founded, this post is actually not about that, but about a comment that David Abernethy made during one of his lectures on India on the Stanford Travel podcast. For those of you who don't know about it, Stanford has a large number of classes and lectures available for free download on iTunes, and I've been making my way through them for the last few weeks. I will write more about these other lectures later.

I have never read Tom Friedman's The World is Flat because it's a very long book with a relatively simple point and there are so many other fascinating things to read, but I found this particular comment really interesting. Abernathy thinks that "The World is Flat" is actually a misnomer because what the book is really about is certain points of the world being much closer connected to other points, e.g. Bangalore being linked more closely to Palo Alto.

He then goes on to argue that the world was in fact flat before the industrial revolution when economic production dependent almost entirely on human labor and the economic output of a country was roughly proportional to its population. While there were obviously some inequities due to differences in geography, etc. and some minor technological advances gdp-per-capita was relatively uniform throughout the world - the world was flat. Only with the start of the industrial revolution were some countries/regions able to vastly increase their productivity and thereby race ahead of the others and if you look at charts of per region GDP over the last few centuries you really do see them starting at relatively equal levels and then see a big gap opening up. The world isn't flat anymore. Not rocket science but an interesting thing to keep in mind. I very much recommend the whole lecture, (European "Envasions:" Competition for Wealth and Power, 1498 -1757).