Recommended reading: It's a flat world afterall

I highly recommend reading Thomas Freeman’s article in the Sunday NY Times Magazine, "It’s a
Flat World, After All" is a real eye-opener about how technology is expanding globalism.  I’m going to pull a few quotes, but I highly recommend reading the rest of the article.

Globalization 1.0
(1492 to 1800) shrank the world from a size large to a size medium, and the
dynamic force in that era was countries globalizing for resources and imperial
conquest. Globalization 2.0 (1800 to 2000) shrank the world from a size medium
to a size small, and it was spearheaded by companies globalizing for markets
and labor. Globalization 3.0 (which started around 2000) is shrinking the world
from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same
time. And while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries
globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies
globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0 — the thing that gives it
its unique character — is individuals and small groups globalizing.

Then Friedman states what–for my money–is the most important thing people in the US (individuals, parents, and kids) can be asking themselves today:

Individuals
must, and can, now ask: where do I fit into the global competition and
opportunities of the day, and how can I, on my own, collaborate with others
globally?

 ”Today, the most profound thing
to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet
Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software
easily available to apply knowledge however they want,” said 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 left field. As
bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the
genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will
be able to design vaccines on your laptop.”

But the
upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an
incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field
and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years
ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in
Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius
in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent.
They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat,
and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join
the innovation fray.

When the
world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get
interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids.