The World is Flat: America & Free Trade summary

This chapter is about how even as the world gets flat, America as a whole will benefit more by sticking to the general principles of free trade than by building walls. However, a policy of free trade is not enough by itself. It must be accompanied by a domestic strategy of upgrading the education of every American, and a foreign strategy of opening restricted markets all over the world.

Although jobs are often lost in bulk to outsourcing of large companies, new jobs are also being created by small companies that you can't see. New jobs and new specialties are continually being created. America as a whole will do fine in a flat world with free trade if it continues to provide knowledge workers who are able to produce idea-based goods that can be sold globally and who are able to fill the knowledge jobs that will be created. There is no limit to the number of idea-generated jobs in the world. There are infinite industries to be created, infinite business to be started, and infinite jobs to be done. The only limiting factor is human imagination.

One new specialty job that is growing is search engine optimizers (SEOs). SEOs study algorithms that are being used by the major search engines to produce their search results, and then try to design marketing and Web strategies that will push their company up the rankings.