As for Friedman’s self-described “poking fun at France” via personalized pep talks to Chirac—“Yo, Jacques, what world do you think you’re livin’ in, pal? Get with the program! It’s called Anglo-American capitalism, mon ami”—and references to “antiglobalist Gaullist Luddites,” there is a decided double standard that Friedman maintains with regard to the technologies he insists are necessary to achieve wealth and productivity.114 Quoted in Foreign Policy as saying “I talk the talk of technology, but I don’t walk the walk,”115 Friedman elsewhere admits to not knowing how to program his VCR,116 and announces to the graduating class of Williams College in 2005: “And don’t leave me a [mobile phone] message, because I still don’t know how to retrieve them and I have no intention of learning.”117
That Friedman is exempt from the get-wired-or-die options he bestows on the rest of the world, with the accompanying warning that “the fast eat the slow,” is thus clear.118 What is not clear is how he feels entitled to complain about the effects of the very technological ubiquity he has demanded. On the one hand, he condemns the lack of wireless infrastructure in the New York subway, expresses extreme displeasure at the number of times his phone calls get dropped on “America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train” (a.k.a. the Acela),119 and devises a hypothetical election campaign based “on a one-issue platform: I promise, if elected, that within four years America will have cellphone service as good as Ghana’s.”120 On the other, he announces he cannot “wait for the day that Motorola comes out with a device that enables you to jam all the cell phones around you”121 so that his restaurant meals are not tainted by other people’s conversations, and laments his inability to interact with Paris cab drivers and passengers on Colorado ski lifts thanks to the monopoly on their attention by technological gadgets.122
It is meanwhile important to recall that, as tough as conditions may be on the ski lift, the level of personal suffering involved undoubtedly pales in comparison to that experienced in other venues on the receiving end of Friedman-sanctioned modernization crusades. Iraq comes to mind, where citizens perish by the hundreds of thousands while Friedman unearths encouraging indications of the possibility that democracy-resistant Arab political culture can change (“Consider what was the most talked-about story in the Arab world in recent weeks. Iraq? No. Palestine? No … It was the Arab version of ‘American Idol’!”123). Other candidates include the countless numbers of people across the globe whose health and livelihoods have been adversely affected by the business practices of biotech giant Monsanto and Canadian gold-mining company Goldcorp Inc., the CEOs of which appear in The Lexus and The World Is Flat, respectively—the former as a humble, principled, and environmentally conscious businessman, the latter as the source of ingenious ways of using the Internet to find gold.
Monsanto holds the distinction of being a Vietnam-era manufacturer of the lethal defoliant Agent Orange, now specializing in genetically engineered crops and the infamous herbicide Roundup, which is toxic to soil, animals, and humans alike. Goldcorp, for its part, is responsible for things like open-pit cyanide leach mining in Guatemala, which results in arsenic-contaminated rivers, deforestation, and a host of physical afflictions for the local population, among them persistent skin rashes and an increase in spontaneous abortions.124 It is fairly obvious that there should be no words of praise for either of these corporations anywhere on the résumé of anyone who feels comfortable beginning sentences with the words “As an environmentalist.”125 It is also fairly obvious that such a person should not announce two months after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster that “I have no problem with more nuclear power, if you can find a utility ready to put up the money,”126 or dismiss European aversion to genetically modified organisms—the cultivation of which is environmentally destructive—as merely another example of the “Euro-whining” that characterizes opposition to war on Iraq.127
Dining at the Hotel Schweizerhof in Davos, Switzerland, in 2003, Friedman is irked to discover a “tiny asterisk”128 on the menu indicating the potential presence of GMOs in meat imported from the United States. The combination of the asterisk and the fact that Europeans continue to smoke cigarettes permits Friedman to arrive at the conclusion that arguments against war by the leaders of Germany and France are “deeply unserious” and that said countries are merely pursuing “an assertion of identity by trying to be whatever the Americans are not.”129 The reason for this behavior is that “being weak after being powerful is a terrible thing. It can make you stupid.”130
The tone of this analysis signals a marked departure from Friedman’s pro-European jubilation of 2001: “I am now officially declaring my total affection and support for the European Union. I love the E.U. I wish there were two. May it go from strength to strength.”131 Acknowledging that the European “version of capitalism will always stress social welfare more than ours,” Friedman argues that it is nonetheless hugely valuable, “in this world of increasingly messy states, for us to have another version of the United States across the Atlantic.”132
This brings us back to the subject of Ireland in 2005, a country that has apparently avoided stupidity by going from potato famine to Dell rather than from strength to weakness, and has proven itself a more loyal replica of the United States by favoring corporations over workers. Friedman informs us: “The Irish have a plan. They are focused. They have mobilized business, labor and government around a common agenda. They are playing offense.”133 Outlining the “leprechaun way” that must now be adopted by Germany and France if they want to avoid economic irrelevance and decline, he states: “One of the first reforms Ireland instituted was to make it easier to fire people.”134
Friedman, whose views on labor rights include that “the most important thing [Ronald] Reagan did was break the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, which helped break the hold of organized labor over the U.S. economy,”135 has long seen job security as an impediment to innovation and progress because “the easier it is to fire people, the more willing companies are to hire people.”136
Actually, the easier it is to fire people, the easier it is for Dell to close its manufacturing center in Limerick, lay off 1,900 employees, and transfer major operations to Poland in 2009, invalidating do-it-yourself guides by New York Times columnists on how to “become one of the richest countries in Europe” through globalization.137 As Sean Kay, chair of the International Studies Program at Ohio Wesleyan University, notes in an article on Foreign Policy’s website, Friedman might have avoided his premature leprechaun celebration had he relied on more thorough investigative techniques than, for example, emailing with Michael Dell about the perks of Irish industrial and tax policies.138
Responding to Friedman’s “wildly inaccurate” statement that, “because of all the tax revenue and employment the global companies are generating in Ireland, Dublin has been able to increase spending on health care, schools and infrastructure,” Kay writes: “In reality, the government at the time was not only not generating revenue, its investment in education was declining and it was beginning to accumulate massive debt. Today, Ireland’s deficit is at 32% of GDP—the highest in the Eurozone.”139 Kay concludes that Friedman “owes it to both the people of Ireland and his readers to correct the record,” given that his flawed theorizing was “embraced and celebrated by an Irish government that was reveling in excess and deeply entangled with corrupt bankers” and that it “reinforced a doubling down on damaging economic and political actions in a small and vulnerable country that is now suffering deep pain”—which will presumably only intensify in accordance with the EU-IMF bank bailout.140
Admitting when one has erred certainly enhances one’s overall credibility and coherence as a journalist and economic commentator, even when one might prefer to distance oneself from past analyses such as that “there is never going to be any European monetary union. Forget it. Buy German marks. They’re all you’ll ever need.”141 It also aids in the recuperation of one’s license to criticize others for pursuing the very policies or ideas one previously promoted. The obstacles to a Friedman apology in the case of Ireland, however, are threefold.
First of all, Friedman
