10 of Thomas Friedman's Dumbest "Big Ideas" | Media. April 23, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. In conferring the honor of “Wanker of the Decade” on New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, blogger Duncan Black observed that “truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything.”
The sorry “state of the world is what it is,” Black continued, “in large part because people in positions of great power think this absurd buffoon of man is a Very Serious Person.” Most readers are presumably familiar with the most prominent theories to have emerged from the brain of Thomas Friedman over the course of his career.
To name a few here: The world is flat. While conducting research for my book about Thomas Friedman, I had the pleasure of reading 17 years’ worth of biweekly dispatches from the three-time Pulitzer recipient. 1. 2. 4. The Fetishization of Balance. By James Kwak I generally don’t bother reading Thomas Friedman. A good friend gave me a copy of The World Is Flat, and I started reading it. Somewhere in the first one hundred pages Friedman has an extended discussion of workflow software (as a key enabler of globalization) and I realized that he knew absolutely nothing about workflow software, so I stopped reading it and gave it away.
Another friend pointed out Friedman’s op-ed in the Times earlier this week in which he argues for “grand bargains” and “balanced” solutions to, well, all of our problems. For example, he says, “We need a proper balance between government spending on nursing homes and nursery schools — on the last six months of life and the first six months of life.” But this is the one that really confused me (and my friend): “The first is a grand bargain to fix our long-term structural deficit by phasing in $1 in tax increases, via tax reform, for every $3 to $4 in cuts to entitlements and defense over the next decade.” The Foibles of Thomas Friedman. Belén Fernández, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. London and New York: Verso, 2011. A researcher once carried out an informal study to try to find out whether or not people actually read the books on bestseller lists. To find out, he put envelopes in the reputedly high-selling books.
In each envelope was a note saying that if those who found the envelopes were to send them to a designated address, the researcher would send them five dollars. According to the story, the response rate was zero. Fernández’s book, part of Verso’s Counterblasts series, in which leftist writers take on the leading lay-preachers of the right, is organized around three themes: Friedman commenting on America and the economy; Friedman commenting on the Middle East; and Friedman commenting on the Special Relationship between America and Israel. The results, as befit the crown prince of American nincompoop commentators, are ridiculous.
Friedman also has other gifts. Errata. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s metaphorical pile-ups, hollow analyses, and factual inaccuracies have garnered him three Pulitzer Prizes, and frighteningly unchecked power. Photograph via Flickr by Charles Haynes “The House Republicans don’t seem to have noticed that today’s U.N. is not the U.N. of the 1970s when the Soviets and their pals could pass a resolution that the world was flat.” —Thomas Friedman, 1995 The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century —Thomas Friedman, 2005 In the first chapter of his bestseller on globalization, The World Is Flat, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times Thomas Friedman suggests that his repertoire of achievements also includes being heir to Christopher Columbus. According to Friedman, he has followed in the footsteps of the fifteenth-century icon by making an unexpected discovery regarding the shape of the world during an encounter with “people called Indians.”
The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. The Lexus & the Olive Tree. Every few years a book comes along that perfectly expresses the moment's conventional wisdom--that says pretty much what everybody else in the chattering classes is saying, but does it in a way that manages to sound fresh and profound. Notable examples are Paul Kennedy's 1989 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, with its theme of "imperial overstretch", of a United States declining under the weight of its military commitments; or Lester Thurow's 1992 Head to Head, with its vision of a desperate commercial struggle among the advanced industrial nations, and of a United States unable to compete effectively because of its naive faith in free markets.
It is already clear that Thomas Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree--which tells the story of the new global economy, and of a United States triumphant because it is the nation best suited to capitalize on that global economy--is the latest in the series. This story is told via hundreds of anecdotes, most of them involving the author.