(MSc) Sebinomics

Right after coming back from my studies in Japan in June 2006, I made a list of books that I wanted to read over the summer. I decided to put five books on the list, namely,

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age by Gurcharan Das, Dogs And Demons: The Fall Of Modern Japan by Alex Kerr,
and last but not least, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman.

I didn’t really know which book to read first, but since I also had the audio book of Friedman’s work, I thought I would listen to the mp3 files first and read another book meanwhile. But after only a few tracks I was sure that I wanted to read this very book right away! Fortunately, I was listening to the first edition of the audio book and was reading the second and expanded edition of the book. Therefore, I was able to notice the changes.

In “The World Is Flat”, Thomas L. Friedman describes the ten forces that made the world flat again. The most important forces I found in the book are the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape browser, in- and outsourcing, and the power of the individual to inform him- or herself. I agree with most of Mr. Friedman’s arguments, but I somehow miss a more global view and would have enjoyed a less American perspective. For example, I also think that India takes a lot of work away from US companies. Indian call-centers, especially, are a big threat to English speaking call-centers in the US, Canada or the UK. But do Europeans need to worry about that too? Not really. Why should Indians be trained to become fluent in Swiss-German, Dutch or any other language, which is spoken only by a few million people? This would be too expensive and ineffective. Hence, European call-centers stay in Europe. And is all of India really “that flat”? The Indian middle-class includes about 300 million people, but there are still at least twice as much Indians who live in very poor circumstances. It is true that the playing field is being leveled and that everyone in India can make a good living without leaving the country. But the economy needs to be careful not to burn all its fuel. What I mean is, salaries have been rising fast for IIT’s (Indian Institute of Technology) graduates and their likes. This has led to outsourcing to cheaper labor places like China. I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but before India takes off for world domination, so to speak, it needs to take care of at least another half a billion Indians and give them an agreeable standard of living. The same counts of course for China.

I really enjoyed reading The World Is Flat and while I was reading Friedman’s words, I asked myself which were the forces that flattened “my world”. The most important flattener so far in my world was “studying abroad”. Every semester thousands of international students leave their universities for studying in a different country with students from different cultures and backgrounds. All of them need to adjust to new customs, behaviors, mentalities, and learn to accept opinions, which might sound completely strange to their ears.

I was lucky to spend two semesters in Minnesota, USA and two semesters in Osaka, Japan. Both experiences influenced my life and made my world flatter than I thought. Especially studying in Japan with more than six hundred students from forty plus countries made me realize how important it is to have friendships across borders, religions, civilizations, and races. Many of these students try to keep in touch with their friends through Skype, MSN Messenger or blogging. They try to use all possible information technology to keep costs as low as possible and still be able to lead a friendship in real-time. Thanks to VoIP (voice over IP) and Skype, user can call each other for free, using a computer and even see each other, if they have a webcam. Astronomical long-distance rates become history thanks to this technology. Studying abroad fosters relationships across the world and creates more and more citizens of the world. While studying at Kansai Gaidai University, I met many foreigners who came to Japan for two semesters, went back to their home countries to graduate, came back for post-graduate studies, eventually stayed in Japan because they got to know (and love) the culture and the country, and some of them even got married to a Japanese woman or man. I have heard similar examples from students, who went to other countries, such as the UK, USA, Mexico, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, men as well as women. The September 11, 2006, issue of Newsweek mentioned that in 2005 marriages between Japanese and non-Japanese in Japan went up to 5.5 percent and is most likely to increase. Two of my friends got married this year to nice Japanese women, and they too came to Japan a long time ago as international students and had such a great time that they just had to come back.

Another flattener that I always miss when I am not in my apartment in Switzerland is the diversity of news brought to me by Satellite- and Cable-TV from many different countries. In my apartment in Switzerland I get news from almost fifty different channels in many different languages. Lets see. I watch the news from the following countries:

Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, U.K., USA, Morocco, Algeria, and the Netherlands.

And if I was able to understand Turkish, Chinese, Polish, Albanese, any of the Ex-Yugoslavian languages, or Arabic, I could increase the amount of information flooding my world. You might say, but the Internet gives me even more possibilities to find information! And I say, Yes! But I need to find it first, whereas the TV brings it right to me. If there is something I don’t like, such as Berlusconi’s biased and manipulating right-wing news, I zap to the Italian national TV and listen to what they have to say about the subject. Or I even zap to the Swiss channels that speak Italian and have close ties with Italy. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you should only watch TV and let the TV entertain you, but the “flat” screen brings us closer together and it is easy to get all the information you need, reported in different manners within an hour. Particularly the views of these channels are different. Just take FoxNews and the German stations at the beginning of the war in Iraq. Then-Chancellor Schröder was opposing to the war and the media helped him to bring this message to the masses. FoxNews did the same thing for President Bush. I consider myself a pacifist and was against the war, but did not know enough about it. Therefore, I read newspapers and tried to get information from many different sources. Geographically and politically speaking, from left to right.
I know there are nations that do not allow foreign TV channels and I think it is a real pity. Even cheap and low quality soap operas can flatten our world. They reflect clichés of a certain society –sometimes kind of exaggerated- and they take us a step closer into the yard of that society. My friends and I learned French only by watching Japanese animation on French television when we were around six years old. And furthermore, we learned about Japanese customs. I am talking about 1970’s cartoons that were sort of daily soaps. We were wondering why the characters in these cartoons always took off their shoes when they entered someone’s home, why they didn’t use forks and spoons, why they always had rice with their meals, and why their cars where driving on the other side of the road. Our parents had to find many answers in their encyclopedias. Our teachers were surprised by our knowledge of Asian culture and of our French language skills.

To me diversity of information is very important and since I don’t have too much time every day to search for information I want to be able to zap the channels for about an hour and be fed with information from all over the world by different channels, with different views, in different languages. Cable- and Satellite-TV give me that and they ensure a flatter world of information with a more transparent way of building my own opinion.