What would the world look like?
This excerpt is taken from Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book, The World Is Flat.
“What if regions of the world were like the neighborhoods of a city? What would the world look like? I’d describe it like this: Western Europe would be an assisted-living facility, with an aging population lavishly attended to by Turkish nurses. The United States would be a gated community, with a metal detector at the front gate and a lot of people sitting in their front yards complaining about how lazy everyone else was, even though out back there was a small opening in the fence for Mexican labor and other energetic immigrants who helped to make the gated community function.
Latin America would be the fun part of town, the club district, where the workday doesn’t begin until 10PM and everyone sleeps until midmorning. It’s definitely the place to hang out, but in between the clubs, you don’t see a lot of new businesses opening up, except on the street where the Chileans live. The landlords in their neighborhood almost never reinvest their profits here, but keep them in a bank across town.
The Arab street would be a dark alley where outsiders fear to tread, except for a few side streets called Dubai, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, and Morocco. The only new businesses are gas stations, whose owners, like the elites in the Latin neighborhood, rarely reinvest their funds in the neighborhood. Many people on the Arab street have their curtains closed, their shutters drawn, and signs on their front lawn that say, “No Trespassing. Beware of Dog.”
India, China, and East Asia would be “the other side of the tracks.” Their neighborhood is a big teeming market, made up of small shops and one-room factories, interspersed wth Stanley Kaplan SAT prep schools and engineering colleges. Nobody ever sleeps in this neighborhood, everyone lives in extended families, and everyone is working and saving to get to “the right side of the tracks.” On the Chinese streets, there’s no rule of law, but the roads are all well paved; there are no potholes, and the streelights all work. On the Indian streets, by contrast, no one ever repairs the streetlights, the roads are full of ruts, but the police are sticklers for a rules. You need a license to open a lemonade stand on the Indian streets. Luckily the local cops can be bribed, and the successfull entrepreneurs all have their own generators to run their factories and the latest cell phones to get around the fact that the local telephone poles are all down.
Africa, sadly, is that part of town where the businesses are boarded up, life expectancy is declining, and the only new buildings are health-care clinics.”
