Article A
Globalization: The Challenge to America
Computers and the Internet have made the world a much smaller place—and brought foreign competition right
to America's doorstep
By Thomas L. Friedman
When your computer crashes in the middle of a late-night homework
session and you call a help line, there's a good chance in this era of
globalization that the friendly person assisting you is on the other side
of the world, possibly in Bangalore, India's high-tech capital.
Bangalore is home to not only Indian firms, but also to outposts of
American companies like Dell, IBM, and Delta Airlines, which in recent
years have been hiring Indians to handle jobs outsourced from the
U.S. Well-educated, ambitious, and fluent in English, young Indians
cost a lot less than their American counterparts: A call-center
employee in Bangalore makes around $5,000 a year, compared with
about $25,000 in the U.S.
Today, there are 160,000 people in high-tech jobs in Bangalore, and they're doing a lot more than answering
help-line calls. Someone in India (or China, South Korea, or elsewhere) may be preparing your parents' tax
returns, reading your X-rays, or writing software you'll soon be using. Globalization has entered a new phase,
with critical implications for all Americans, especially young people. New York Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas
L. Friedman wonders if the U.S. is ready for the challenge.
For so many years, America's economy was so dominant on the world stage, so out front in so many key
areas, that we fell into the habit of thinking we were competing largely against ourselves. If we fell behind in
one area or another— whether it was math and science skills, broadband capacity, or wireless infrastructure—
we took the view that: "Oh well, we'll fix that problem when we get to it. After all, we're just competing against
ourselves."
In recent years, though, with the leveling of the global playing field, it should be apparent that we are not just
competing against ourselves. The opening up of countries like India, China, and Russia means that their young
people can plug and play—connect, collaborate, and compete—more easily and cheaply than ever before. And
they are. We, alas, are still coasting along as if we have all the time in the world.
"Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the [former]
Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply
knowledge however they want," says Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first
commercial Internet browser. "That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of somewhere
unexpected."
The Internet Comes To Life
A key date was Aug. 9, 1995—the day Netscape went public. Netscape brought the Internet to life by making
an easy-to-use Web browser widely available. Its stock offering also triggered the dot-com boom, prompting
American companies to invest billions of dollars in fiberoptic telecommunications cable. And when undersea
and underground fiber networks drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data, and images, Boston,
Bangalore, and Beijing became next-door neighbors overnight.
These developments produced even more ways in which individuals and companies around the world could
collaborate. Among them were "outsourcing" and "offshoring," in which all kinds of work—even entire factories
and research facilities—could be shifted from the United States and Western Europe to places like China and
India, where the work could be done cheaper, and in some cases, better.
Innovation Without Emigration
Yet another major change occurred during the 1990s: Some 3 billion people who had been out of the global
economic game came onto the playing field—the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin
America, and Central Asia. As their economies and political systems opened up, they were able to join the free
market.
No country has benefited more from these changes, including America's massive investment in technology,
than India. "India had no resources and no infrastructure," says Dinakar Singh, a Wall Street executive whose
parents earned doctorates in India before emigrating to America. "For decades, you had to leave India to be a
professional. Now, you can plug into the world from India."
This meeting of new countries on a new playing field may be the most important force shaping global
economics and politics in the early 21st century. China now supplies as much as 70 percent of the
merchandise sold by Wal-Mart, America's biggest private employer. But what China really wants is that the
next generation of products not just be "made in China" but also "designed in China," and eventually "dreamed
up in China." The same goes for India.
According to Craig Barrett, the CEO of Intel, "You don't bring 3 billion people into the world economy overnight
without huge consequences, especially from three societies [India, China, and Russia] with rich educational
heritages." That is why there is no guarantee that America and Western Europe will be leading the way as the
21st century unfolds.
Rajesh Rao, a video-game entrepreneur from Bangalore, suggests that instead of complaining about
outsourcing, Americans and Western Europeans "would be better off thinking about how you can . . . raise
yourself into doing something better." Says Rao: "Americans whining—we have never seen that before."
Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., says that a "quiet crisis" is
eroding America's scientific and engineering base. "If left unchecked," says Jackson, the first black woman to
earn a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "this could challenge our superiority
and ability to innovate or invent."
Tomorrow's Work Force
Three gaps now plague America. The first is an "ambition gap." Compared with young Indians and Chinese,
too many Americans have become lazy. We also have a "numbers gap"—we are not producing enough
engineers and scientists. And finally, we are developing an "education gap."
Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, is concerned about high school education in America. "When I compare our
high schools to what I see when I'm traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow," says
Gates. "By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations [in math and
science] . . . In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers,
America is falling behind."
Everyone is going to have to run a little faster to advance his or her standard of living. When I was growing up,
my parents used to say to me, "Tom, finish your dinner— people in China are starving." I am now telling my
own daughters, "Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs."
Article B
National Geographic
by Erla Zwingle
“Globalization”—lots of people seem to think it means that the world is turning into America. Coke, CNN, McDonald’s,
Levi’s, Nikes—if they haven’t taken over the world yet, the feeling goes, they will soon.
But regardless of whether you’re buying or selling, in the past 20 years much of the world’s economy has become
increasingly integrated.
Yet globalization is more than the mere transfer of goods, the fact that, for instance, you can buy French mineral water
and Danish beer in the Shanghai airport or eat Japanese ramen out of your suburban microwave. It’s the beginning of
cheap and ever-present information technologies that is dissolving our sense of boundaries. More and more television
channels and the Internet have contributed to what has been called a “woven world.”
When we talk about “globality” (a new buzzword), we’re trying to define a world in which cultures meet and, rather than
fight, they blend. That’s how you end up listening to something called “bhangra pop” in India, to take an example at
random: sounds like Jamaican reggae played on traditional Indian instruments, then amplified.
Big Bird in China
I went to China, India, and Los Angeles to discover what globalization feels like in three of the most diverse places on
Earth. Almost immediately I found that the ideas I started out with turned out to be too small, too old, or just plain wrong.
For the past year and a half in Shanghai, for example, Chinese children have been tuning in to that American children’s
classic TV show Sesame Street. But here it’s called Zhima Jie, and when you look closer, it’s not simply the American
show. The show’s team of actors and educators has been collaborating to produce a program that promotes Chinese, rather
than American, values. The kids are loving it.
“The Chinese want an environment that’s relaxed and fun that their children can be learning in,” senior producer Cooper
Wright told me on the phone from New York. “They think they have enough formal settings for learning already. But they
wanted it to include a lot of their ancient culture. The parents get home late, they all work, and they don’t have time to
teach their children this, so they feel the show will help with that.”
This group does many of the usual Sesame Street activities—teaching numbers, for instance—but instead of the alphabet
they teach the origin and meaning of Chinese characters. They explain the history and customs of certain festivals.
They describe certain ancient art forms. And they also teach sharing and cooperation.
Why does this matter? Because the one-child policy has produced millions of only children who don’t live in the large
families that once fostered such behaviors. Many Chinese freely admit that a lot of these kids, with two sets of
grandparents and two parents who work, are pretty spoiled.
“We want to concentrate on reflecting Chinese families,” explained Professor Li Ji Mei, who designed part of the
show’s curriculum, “such as what children could do to show their respect for the family. Another important part of the
program is to make children realize how much their parents do for their well-being.
I asked Professor Li if she thought there was much difference between Chinese and American children. “I think American
children are more active,” she replied immediately. “They’re freer in expressing themselves, take the initiative more, and
they’re more independent. When Chinese babies fall on the ground, they lie there and expect their parents to pick them
up.” But Ye Chao, the show’s producer in Shanghai, notes, “I think the difference today between children in Chinese
cities and rural areas is far bigger than between American and Chinese children.”
By now, 19 countries around the world are producing their own versions of Sesame Street, using television to
interpret their unique cultures. It seems to be working. Does Big Bird feel he’s promoting America to his tiny viewers? “I
don’t think so,” Ye Chao said. “We just borrowed an American idea and put Chinese content into it.”
McLaks and Maharaja Macs
McDonald’s may be the most notorious name in the whole business of American culture going global. There are
approximately 24,500 McDonald’s restaurants in over 115 countries; a new McDonald’s opens somewhere in the
world every six hours. Like Coke, though, it’s easy to put down as the symbol of the gross, unhealthy, side of American
culture. Some Japanese critics have blamed sugary junk food for juvenile crime.
But McDonald’s has actually been remarkably responsive to the local cultures; they offer ayran (a popular chilled
yogurt drink) in Turkey; McLaks (a grilled salmon sandwich) in Norway, and teriyaki burgers in Japan. In New
Delhi, India, where Hindus shun beef and Muslims refuse pork, the burgers are made of lamb and called Maharaja Macs.
And if you’re vegetarian, as many strict Hindus are, even better: There’s not only the McAloo Tikki burger, a spicy
vegetarian patty made of potatoes and peas, but they even figured out how to make a vegetarian mayonnaise that’s really
pretty good, and doing it without eggs is no small feat.
I had lunch in one of the eight McDonald’s in New Delhi; first mariachi music, then a disco version of the theme from
Titanic blared from the ceiling. “Cooking lamb is very different from beef,” the manager, Sandip Maithal, told me. “The
fat percentage is very different. And for the vegetarians, we have two separate areas of preparation. Workers with green
aprons handle only vegetarian food, while those with black aprons handle nonvegetarian food.
“We even separated the two menus—being Indian, we had a good understanding that vegetarians wouldn’t want to have
to read about meat dishes.” What this has meant is that mixed groups of people, with drastically different tastes and
customs, have finally found a place where they can all eat together. Is this an American idea? Does it matter?
I did some reading up on McDonald’s around the world, and I found that while it undeniably represents change, it’s
usually positive. Take bathrooms. Till McDonald’s arrived, customers of many Asian restaurants were resigned to
bathrooms that were horrifying. Now they’re demanding better. (I approached one mother in a Shanghai McDonald’s
whose toddler was gnawing french fries. Did she think the food was good? “No,” she replied. So why did she come here?
“Because it’s clean,” she said.)
Women in traditional cultures like to meet at McDonald’s because there’s no alcohol served, and they see it as a safe,
socially acceptable place for a woman alone to go. And, far from being a place where you eat and run, many people,
from the elderly to teenagers, see it as a spot where they can linger. In cities where space is at a premium, like Hong
Kong, teenagers like it because it’s somewhere outside their often cramped apartments where they can meet their
friends—sometimes they even do their homework there.
But the fact that the staff are all local people means that the restaurant, though obviously foreign, isn’t instantly perceived
as being American. In New Delhi, as in Brazil or Manila, you may well buy your burger from the kid down the street who
speaks the local dialect.