"It's not about ruling anybody. That's the point. There is nobody to rule anymore."

"The most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early twenty-first century" is not the admittedly important war on terrorism but a "triple convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration."

Friedman offers an engrossing tour of Flat World, but he sometimes overestimates its novelty.

It's not at all clear we'll like the long-term geopolitical consequences of having emerging powers reliant on scraps from the American economic table.

In a sense, The World Is Flat serves as a sort of bookend to this spring's other blockbuster economics book, Jeffrey D. Sachs's The End of Poverty.