Hot, Flat and Crowded Review (In-Depth) | Thomas L. Friedman | Is this a right book for you?
Hot Flat and Crowded Review- I read Friedman’s earlier book “The World is Flat,” which I liked very much. I like “Hot, Flat and Crowded” even better.
Thomas Friedman is the world’s foremost writer on the subject of globalization, and that study has taken him in a new direction: Code Green. The impact of globalization has been worldwide growth and the emergence of new middle classes numbering in the hundreds of millions in “Chindia”. Friedman has named these “Americums”, foreign emulation of the U.S. lifestyle that includes large houses and conspicuous consumption. Unfortunately the global biosphere cannot continue to absorb these rates of consumption, and the planet is heating up while finite resources like coal, oil, timber, fresh water, and fresh air begin to run out. Friedman approaches all of these things as a challenge to the United States, a time in history to “outgreen” the competition and become the world leader in clean technologies.
Early chapters cover the relationship between the price of oil and relative freedoms inside countries like Iran and Russia, and Friedman makes some remarkable points such as “$70-a-barrel oil followed by $10-a-barrel oil killed the Soviet Union.” The author’s petropolitical analysis is worthy of a Nobel in economics, and he then moves on to discuss ways the U.S. can move forward on a new Green path, and how our current, painless “green party” comes up well short of being a Green Revolution.
America got off track under Reaganism, which taught us that government is generally wrong, while private enterprise is more likely right. But what we found out was that what was good for General Motors (short-term) was not always good for the…….
