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Is America Falling Off the Flat Earth? (2007) / Chapter Skim
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DISTANCE IS DEAD
Pages 8-13

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From page 8...
... Corporations deciding where to locate new factories, offices, and research laboratories search the entire globe for promising venues. And most investors exploring financial opportunities do not limit their search to local concerns.
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From page 9...
... Many examples of the death of distance are already to be found in our daily lives: • If a consumer places a telephone call to a service department to resolve a prob lem with a computer, bank account, golf reservation, or lost airline bag, there is a nontrivial likelihood that the consumer will speak with a person in Bangalore, Jamaica, or some other such place. One international call center is now being operated by the prisoners in Rome's Rebibbia Prison.
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From page 10...
... • Much of the commercial software now prevalent in the United States is construct ed in India, where at the end of each day teams of workers transmit the results of their efforts to American integrators and testers who are just beginning their day, and the product of their efforts is transmitted back to India in time for the start of the next day's work, thereby doubling the pace and cutting the cost with which software can be produced. • Many Americans' income tax returns prepared by major accounting firms are processed in India.
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From page 11...
... Tom Friedman, writing in his extraordinarily insightful book The World is Flat, takes this notion to an entirely new level: not only is the world flat, but many heretofore relatively unknown parts are very significant indeed. He observes that globalization has "accidentally made Beijing, Bangalore, and Bethesda next door neighbors." Foremost among the consequences of the death of distance is that a large number of jobs, with the exception of those demanding proximity between the parties involved, will be opened to the global job market.
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From page 12...
... As it happens, the central ordering facility is, at present, in Colorado Springs, but it could just as easily be in Alice Springs, in the Outback of Australia. Initially, many of the jobs threatened by the global employment revolution moved to Mexico, but those jobs are now moving out of Mexico, which by the new global standard is becoming high-priced albeit not nearly as high priced as the United States.
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From page 13...
... What is clear is that attempting to build "walls," in the form of economic barriers, around the United States will simply ensure that we are left in isolation and become increasingly irrelevant as the rest of the world moves rapidly forward. Ironically, China itself tried this in the 15th century and again in the 20th .
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  • cell phone
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  • corporations deciding
  • employment revolution
  • major accounting
  • seeking workers
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  • employer seeking
  • increasingly irrelevant
  • emerging china
  • million words
  • income tax


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