Interpersonal Skills: How To Read People - Eyes

HIGHLIGHT: Do all liars have tells? Yes. When you lie, you're subconsciously trying to get out of your own insides, and so you overly externalize.

MORAL: Watch people, listen to what they say, how they say it and watch for subtle cues.

How to read liars and learn the trick to telling a whopper - and getting away with it

By: Ben Paynter

You know your son better than anybody else does, but you can't tell if he's lying to you or if he's just nervous talking about cigarettes. Or maybe you have an employee who seems to have an unusually high frequency of doctors' appointments. If you were fluent in body language, you'd always know guile from gospel, says Marc Salem, a self-described mentalist who holds advanced degrees in psychology and cognitive science from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, respectively. For the past 30 years, he has made a career out of reading people. He has taught interrogation tactics to the FBI, the Secret Service, and the New York City Police Department. Salem has even beaten a polygraph, and now he shares the secrets of his craft in his book, The Six Keys to Unlock and Empower Your Mind, out this month. Here, the master interrogator explains how to read liars and reveals the trick to telling a whopper--and getting away with it.

Best Life: How can you discern genuine from dishonest body language?
Marc Salem: Think of a conversation as a package of related signals. What you're looking for are breaks in a person's normal pattern, abrupt gestures like hand clenching or head movements, or someone shifting his posture away from you. Imagine you're watching the scene back as a video: You might think slowing down the frames will help you pick out inconsistencies, but with lying, it is just the opposite. In fast-forward, suddenly you see repeated movements that you didn't realize were there before, because at normal speed, they are spaced farther apart. They're sort of like guilty tics.

BL: Do all liars have tells?
MS: Yes. When you lie, you're subconsciously trying to get out of your own insides, and so you overly externalize. A person who covers his mouth with his left hand while talking is usually lying. If someone looks up and to the right, he's probably trying to invent an answer rather than tell the truth. People look to the left, either up or down, when recalling the truth. But the ultimate red flag is pupil dilation. Almost no one can escape that.

BL: Why do the pupils dilate?
MS: Pupil dilation is a direct biological response to an emotional reaction. It shows a high level of excitation. Anyone who is telling a lie, unless he's pathological, will experience some sort of emotional discomfort, no matter how slight. That discomfort registers in this uncontrollable physical response. You can't fake it, and it will give you away almost every time. The only way to tell a lie successfully is to use the tools of a method actor and become someone else. You have to believe what you're saying.

For Kenzie

Things To Know: Happiness

HIGHLIGHT: Quenching feelings of hardship also means never feeling desire or want. Unpleasant as those emotions can be, they're also the basis for ambition and creativity. "Happy people are not ambitious," Greenfield says. "They do not build civilizations."

MORAL: It'd is OK to have frustration and a restless fire within you.

Drugs. Implants. Virtual reality. Do we really want joy 24/7?

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed a universal right to the pursuit of happiness. The key word there is pursuit. Jefferson thought that people ought to be free to chase after happiness; whether they attained it was their own business. In the 18th century, the technology to get happy despite circumstance or personality did not exist. Now, though, it's on its way — and that's not as delightful as it sounds.

What constitutes happiness? Freedom from worry? Or maybe contentment? A good definition remains elusive despite decades of neuroscience and psychiatry. Many researchers today have come to think that people have affect set points and that some of us are naturally happier than others. In describing optimal experience — the subjective state of happiness he calls flow — the psychiatrist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says it comes down to engaging in activities just beyond our skill level. Like Jefferson, Csikszent mihalyi understands that pursuit, and not outcome, is what's important.

Being reductionist about happiness doesn't mean it isn't fun, in all its myriad forms — free-floating rapture, blissed-out contentment, ecstatic partying. It's just that as a species, we generally keep these experiences in check. After all, the ways to induce them — alcohol, drugs, OK Go concerts — have historically come at a high cost.

We're entering an age in which technology may allow us to produce pleasant sensations all the time. Hints of that future go back to Prozac and other neurotransmitter-controlling drugs introduced in the late 1980s. But our ability to manipulate the molecules and electrical impulses whizzing through our heads is reaching a newly sophisticated level. Precise brain scanning is creating a vast trove of information about what happens psychologically, physiologically, and chemically when we are happy or sad (or stressed, angry, loving, homicidal, spiritual, or altruistic). The narcolepsy drug Provigil turns out to make people feel pretty fabulous and is taken as a stimulant. Ecstasy use has declined and cocaine use seems to have leveled off, but use of the ADHD prescription drug Adderall — increased focus, higher productivity — is on the rise. Today, neural implants are used to treat more than 30,000 people worldwide with Parkinson's disease; someday soon they might reliably jolt regions of the brain to induce or suppress specific emotions. "There is an industry of sorts that is trying to seduce you," says Oxford University pharmacologist Susan Greenfield, author of Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel. "They want you to lose yourself, to want more of their product, whether it's virtual reality or a pill."

Obviously, sick people — say, with Parkinson's or narcolepsy — need medical intervention. And some percentage of humans will seek out mood-altering substances or experiences that imperil their lives. The problems start when happy-making tech nologies can be plugged in all day long without any of the traditional limits. I'm certainly not against technology. But should we use it to cure insecurity? Normal anxiety? We risk medicalizing the human condition.

From a distance, pleasure without fear or desire sounds pretty good. But in your grasp, it starts to feel less like paradise and more like soma. A species that shuts out adversity does not survive very long in a Darwinian universe. In the short term, humans with happy-making neural implants would cease to be interesting. Quenching feelings of hardship also means never feeling desire or want. Unpleasant as those emotions can be, they're also the basis for ambition and creativity. "Happy people are not ambitious," Greenfield says. "They do not build civilizations."

Ultimately, the problem could be self-correcting. As rich Westerners buy all the happiness products they can jam into their amygdalas, the developing world will be left blissfully productive. A good thing, because places like China and India have mighty new cities and wealth to build.

Maybe it's no coincidence that some of the happy-making stuff is manufactured in those countries. It's reminiscent of the scenario laid out by another prescient thinker, H. G. Wells. In his book The Time Machine, Wells wrote about a world where the happy, indolent elite — the Eloi — are served by industrious outsiders called Morlocks. The Eloi are also the hardworking Morlocks' food. Grim stuff. And also the exact opposite of what Jefferson was trying to tee up for Americans. Maybe he knew that if you have too much happiness, you don't get life and liberty.

David Ewing Duncan

For Kenzie

Sports: A father's view of Title IX

HIGHLIGHT: College used to be a "man's" world, with little attention to female athletes.

MORAL: Don't lose sight of the hard word of those before you and take advantage of college athletics if you can!

A father's view of Title IX

San Francisco Chronicle

THERE IS something special about seeing your daughter dressed up for the prom, looking poised and gorgeous, as mine was on a recent Saturday night. There is something equally beautiful about seeing her bolting through the rain for a soccer ball, hair matted and socks flecked with mud, against the bay-chilled wind on a February night.

You can credit Title IX with making the second scene an attainable dream for so many young women.

On June 23, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon signed a 37-word piece of legislation that prohibited discrimination "on the basis of sex" in any education program or activity that received federal assistance.

As anyone who was in high school or college in 1972 knows, Title IX's effects on competitive athletics have been profound. It is evident in the fivefold increase in the number of women participating in intercollegiate athletics today; and the tenfold increase in the number of young women competing in high school sports.

The positive impact of Title IX is apparent in the athleticism and self-image of the young women who participate in sports today. It helped put an end to the cultural notion that only a "tomboy" would relish robust athletic competition.

"When I was in grade school in Reston, Va., I wasn't allowed to do sports ... I was taught to put my hair up, walk upright, learn proper manners and makeup, while the boys got to play basketball," said Jill Lounsbury, the 40ish manager of the San Francisco Nighthawks, a soccer team that draws scholarship athletes from across the nation to compete in a summer league. "I was better than most of the boys in sports, yet I had to do my hair, which I'm still not very good at."

Lounsbury credits Title IX with giving her and her teammates the chance to inaugurate an NCAA soccer team at Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Wash., in the early 1980s.

Lounsbury said the speed and intensity of the game has picked up immensely, but even more dramatic is the demeanor of today's intercollegiate athletes.

"Now the main quality they have in common is they're so confident, capable and independent," she observed. "They think they can do anything."

By now, various studies have established beyond doubt that girls who participate in sports have higher self-esteem, lower drug-abuse and pregnancy rates and better odds of attaining a college degree. Then there are the intangibles: lessons on teamwork, winning and losing gracefully, rebounding from failure.

"Sports is a place where you learn to be leaders," Lounsbury said.

It's hard to imagine that anyone would want to roll back the clock. But the 1972 law cannot be taken for granted. It has been maligned, unjustly, for causing the demise of non-revenue men's sports such as wrestling and gymnastics. A far greater stress on "minor sports" has been that the king of "revenue sports" -- football -- spends more than it takes in at almost half of Division I-A and I-AA schools. A 2005 survey of major college programs showed that football averaged operating deficits of $1 million.

The best that can be said of the Bush administration is that it has been passive about enforcing the law. Just one of the 416 complaints filed about Title IX violations from 2002 to 2006 were initiated by the federal government, according to the National Women's Law Center.

Earlier this month, the Pacific Legal Foundation and College Sports Council petitioned the U.S. Department of Education to remove one of the three tests of Title IX compliance: The determination of whether a school's athletic offerings for men and women is "substantially proportionate" to the student body's gender mix. That test has been vital in assuring opportunities for female athletes -- and they have seized them, as the participation numbers attest.

Guess what? More men are playing intercollegiate sports today than in 1972. Title IX, when fairly administered, is win-win.

Knowing how sensitive a 17-year-old can be about any public doting by a parent, I alerted my three-sport daughter that I wanted to mention her athletic endeavors in the course of a column about Title IX.

"What's Title IX?" she asked.

Perhaps that's the ultimate measure of Title IX's progress, 35 years later. It's no longer a huge controversy. Young women assume they have a right to athletic opportunities.

Yet all of us should be aware of the forces that want to declare victory or redefine "equality" even before the playing fields are truly level.

John Diaz is The Chronicle's editorial page editor.

For Kenzie

Employment: More American jobs may be headed offshore

HIGHLIGHT:
Nearly 400,000, or 31 percent, of local San Diego jobs have the potential to be moved overseas during the next two decades, according to the analysis, based on an index created by Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder.

MORAL:
Pick you major wisely!

More American jobs may be headed offshore

Study: 400,000 in county have overseas potential

By David Washburn
STAFF WRITER

June 10, 2007

The offshoring debate was over at Sky Mobilemedia before it began.

Within two years of its 2003 inception, the San Diego-based maker of cell phone operating systems employed a work force spanning the globe. Now, only 30 of the company's 120 employees live locally, with the rest divided among offices in India, Israel and Croatia.


“This is the reality of a startup company,” said Naser Partovi, chief executive of Sky Mobilemedia.

He estimates that he can hire three – even four – software engineers in Bangalore, India, for the cost of one in San Diego. “The cost structure is prohibitive if you have everyone here,” he said.

Partovi's reality may be shared by an increasing number of San Diego County companies and their workers, according to an analysis by The San Diego Union-Tribune of the potential offshoring of county jobs.

Nearly 400,000, or 31 percent, of local jobs have the potential to be moved overseas during the next two decades, according to the analysis, based on an index created by Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder.

How exportable is your job?

To find out the “offshoreability” of specific jobs in San Diego, go to uniontrib.com/more/offshore
Nationally, Blinder estimates that 37.7 million jobs, or 29 percent of the current U.S. work force, could be outsourced to other countries within the next 10 to 20 years.

Blinder's study, released in March, is the most recent – and perhaps most ambitious – attempt to quantify the effects of globalization on American workers. He analyzed more than 800 occupations and placed each on a scale from “highly offshoreable” to “highly unoffshoreable.”

Not surprisingly, he found that computer programmers and data-entry clerks were the most vulnerable. But other jobs deemed “highly offshoreable” crisscross the employment spectrum and include such occupations as editor, drafter, graphic designer and insurance underwriter.

Blinder said he is estimating the number of jobs that potentially could go offshore, not the number that actually will move overseas. Nonetheless, he sees big changes ahead.

“I believe there will a long and somewhat painful reallocation of labor analogous to what has happened over the last 50 years with Americans in factories,” Blinder said.

U.S. companies have been moving jobs abroad for a generation. It started in manufacturing, with factory work moving to Mexico, China and other low-wage countries where everything from designer clothes to television sets could be made for a fraction of the labor costs in the United States.

Next to head offshore were American jobs in customer service and data entry. Today, U.S. companies employ more than 900,000 offshore service workers, according to McKinsey & Co., a San Francisco economic think tank.

And offshoring is moving up the food chain, as computer systems analysts, microbiologists and financial analysts join factory workers, telemarketers and call-center operators in “offshoreable” professions.

Current trends notwithstanding, several economists say Blinder vastly overestimates the potential for offshoring. One went so far as to call his analysis “dead wrong.”

A McKinsey & Co. study in 2005 concluded that the United States stands to lose at most 11 percent, or 18.3 million, service jobs to other countries by 2010.

Blinder argues that steady advances in communications technology, along with growing wealth in the developing world, will gradually increase the flow of service-sector jobs overseas. This will be especially true for computer-based jobs that do not require a lot of face-to-face contact.

“This will not be a permanent mass unemployment,” Blinder said. “But there needs to be internal migration from impersonal service jobs to personal jobs.”

Marney Cox, an economist for the San Diego Association of Governments, largely agrees with Blinder's conclusions and said San Diego County companies and policymakers need to prepare for a changing employment landscape.

“San Diego is more 'offshoreable' than most places,” Cox said. “Our most important jobs – jobs that drive our economy – are exportable.”


NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune
Naser Partovi, CEO of San Diego-based Sky Mobilemedia, says he can hire three or four software engineers in Bangalore, India, for the cost of one in San Diego.

The Union-Tribune analysis showed that 7.5 percent – or 95,795 – of the jobs in San Diego County are “highly offshoreable.” This compares with 6.3 percent of all U.S. jobs that Blinder puts in that category.

Among the highly threatened local workers are biochemists and biophysicists. These are bread-and-butter jobs in the county's biotech sector, which employs more than 36,000 people and is the third-largest concentration of biotech jobs in the nation.

There are no reliable estimates for the number of local jobs that have moved offshore from San Diego County in recent years, but there is some anecdotal evidence.

Over the past two years, locally based Accelrys, which develops drug-discovery software, has cut 100 employees from its San Diego operation and shifted more work to a facility in Bangalore.

Last year, San Diego's Immusol laid off about a dozen of its 50 employees – most of them scientists working in drug discovery – while continuing to contract out work to companies in Shanghai and Beijing.

“The most vulnerable job is chemists,” said Zhu Shen, vice president of business development at Immusol. “We are seeing great value from Russian, Chinese and Indian companies at a great price, and the quality of work is comparable to here.”

Yet, Cox said, local politicians are choosing to spend public money on ballparks, cruise ship terminals and convention centers, which create relatively low-paying jobs, rather than funding infrastructure and services for high-tech industries.

“What about biotech, environmental tech and software engineering?” Cox asked. “Where is the public investment in these industries? A few things in front of us today show we are not serious about these industries.”

Funding for alternative sources of energy and better local airport service are the kinds of public expenditures that policymakers need to be focusing on, he said.

Rare is the economist who would disagree with the notion that forward-looking public policy is the key to long-term economic health. But several prominent labor economists have taken issue with Blinder's study.

To begin with, Blinder makes broad assumptions that other economists say are unrealistic. For example, when determining how readily a job could be done offshore, he deems every worker in that job as equally movable.

“Let's say there are 4 million accountants. He says all 4 million are offshoreable,” said Lori Kletzer, a professor of economics at University of California Santa Cruz.

“That is a bit of a stretch – every accountant is not going to disappear from the U.S. work force.”

Blinder also fails to consider that as the Chinese and Indian economies continue to grow, they will need goods and services provided by U.S. workers, said Jagdish Bhagwati, a Columbia University economics professor.

“He is just dead wrong,” said Bhagwati, who also is a senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “I would be astonished if something like he is predicting actually happened.”

Bhagwati and others say Blinder incorrectly assumes that any tradable job in the U.S. work force is vulnerable to offshoring. But in many cases, it will be workers in developing countries who will be more vulnerable as technology advances.

Companies in China and India will have the opportunity to employ the services of a highly skilled U.S. architect or accountant rather than settle for a lower-skilled practitioner in their own country, Bhagwati said.

“It is we who stand to gain in many cases, not them,” he said.

Diana Farrell, who wrote the McKinsey & Co. study, said her research jibes more with Bhagwati's position.

While acknowledging that her study has a shorter time frame – five years versus Blinder's 10 or 20 years – she said the less-tangible things, such as management attitudes and worries about intellectual-property protection, will keep companies from moving jobs overseas even if they could do so.

“We estimate that no more than several hundred thousand U.S. jobs per year will be lost to offshoring, affecting less than 2 percent of all service jobs,” Farrell said. “That is far fewer than the normal rate of job turnover in the economy.”

Regardless of which estimate proves to be more accurate, it's likely to be of little consequence to the workers at Sky Mobilemedia. Min Kim, a senior software engineer, said job insecurity has been a part of his life throughout his 15 years in high tech.

“Many companies don't care about the engineer; they care about profit,” the 38-year-old said. “You have to continually reinvent yourself or you will fall back.”

Blinder said that if every U.S. worker has Kim's attitude, the work force will not only survive but thrive as the global economy evolves.

“U.S. workers will win by staying ahead of the curve,” he said. “Creativity and innovation are crucial.”

For Kenzie

Employment: Why the World Is Flat

HIGHLIGHT: For instance, what advice should we give to our kids?

When I was growing up, my parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving."

I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

MORAL:
When choosing a college major, choose wisely!


Thirty-five years ago this summer, the golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez was competing in his seventh US Open, played that year at Hazeltine Country Club outside Minneapolis. Tied for second place after the opening round, Rodriguez eventually finished 27th, a few strokes ahead of such golf legends as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, and Gary Player. His caddy for the tournament was a 17-year-old local named Tommy Friedman.

Rodriguez retired from golf several years later. But his caddy - now known as Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and author of the new book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century - has spent his career deploying the skills he used on the golf course: describing the terrain, shouting warnings and encouragement, and whispering in the ears of big players. After 10 years of writing his twice-weekly foreign affairs column, Friedman has become the most influential American newspaper columnist since Walter Lippmann.

One reason for Friedman's influence is that, in the mid-'90s, he staked out the territory at the intersection of technology, financial markets, and world trade, which the foreign policy establishment, still focused on cruise missiles and throw weights, had largely ignored. "This thing called globalization," he says, "can explain more things in more ways than anything else."

Friedman's 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, provided much of the intellectual framework for the debate. "The first big book on globalization that anybody actually read," as Friedman describes it, helped make him a fixture on the Davos-Allen Conference-Renaissance Weekend circuit. But it also made him a lightning rod. He's been accused of "rhetorical hyperventilation" and dismissed as an "apologist" for global capital. The columnist Molly Ivins even dubbed top-tier society's lack of concern for the downsides of globalization "the Tom Friedman Problem."

After 9/11, Friedman says, he paid less attention to globalization. He spent the next three years traveling to the Arab and Muslim world trying to get at the roots of the attack on the US. His columns on the subject earned him his third Pulitzer Prize. But Friedman realized that while he was writing about terrorism, he missed an even bigger story: Globalization had gone into overdrive. So in a three-month burst last year, he wrote The World Is Flat to explain his updated thinking on the subject.

Friedman enlisted some impressive editorial assistance. Bill Gates spent a day with him to critique the theory. Friedman presented sections of the book to the strategic planning unit at IBM and to Michael Dell. But his most important tutors were two Indians: Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys, and Vivek Paul, a top executive at Wipro. "They were the guys who really cracked the code for me."

Wired sat down with Friedman in his office at the Times' Washington bureau to discuss the flattening of the world.

WIRED: What do you mean the world is flat?
FRIEDMAN: I was in India interviewing Nandan Nilekani at Infosys. And he said to me, "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." Indians and Chinese were going to compete for work like never before, and Americans weren't ready. I kept chewing over that phrase - the playing field is being leveled - and then it hit me: Holy mackerel, the world is becoming flat. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance - or soon, even language.

So, we're talking about globalization enhanced by things like the rise of open source?
This is Globalization 3.0. In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny. There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.

Is that why the Netscape IPO is one of your "10 flatteners"? Explain.
Three reasons. Netscape brought the Internet alive with the browser. They made the Internet so that Grandma could use it and her grandchildren could use it. The second thing that Netscape did was commercialize a set of open transmission protocols so that no company could own the Net. And the third is that Netscape triggered the dotcom boom, which triggered the dotcom bubble, which triggered the overinvestment of a trillion dollars in fiber-optic cables.

Are you saying telecommunications trumps terrorism? What about September 11? Isn't that as important?
There's no question flattening is more important. I don't think you can understand 9/11 without understanding flattening.

This is probably the first book by a major foreign affairs thinker that talks about the world-changing effects of … supply chains.
[Laughs.]

Why are supply chains so important?
They're incredible flatteners. For UPS to work, they've got to create systems with customs offices around the world. They've got to design supply chain algorithms so when you take that box to the UPS Store, it gets from that store to its hub and then out. Everything they are doing is taking fat out of the system at every joint. I was in India after the nuclear alert of 2002. I was interviewing Vivek Paul at Wipro shortly after he'd gotten an email from one of their big American clients saying, "We're now looking for an alternative to you. We don't want to be looking for an alternative to you. You don't want us to be looking for an alternative to you. Do something about this!" So I saw the effect that India's being part of this global supply chain had on the behavior of the Indian business community, which eventually filtered up to New Delhi.

And that's how you went from your McDonald's Theory of Conflict Prevention - two countries that have a McDonald's will never go to war with each other - to the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention.
Yes. No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain like Dell's will fight against each other as long as they are both part of that supply chain. When I'm managing your back room, when I'm managing your HR, when I'm doing your accounting - that's way beyond selling you burgers. We are intimately in bed with each other. And that has got to affect my behavior.

In some sense, then, the world is a gigantic supply chain. And you don't want to be the one who brings the whole thing down.
Absolutely.

Unless your goal is to bring the whole thing down. Supply chains work for al Qaeda, too, don't they?
Al Qaeda is nothing more than a mutant supply chain. They're playing off the same platform as Wal-Mart and Dell. They're just not restrained by it. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain. That's what we're up against in Iraq. We're up against a suicide supply chain. You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It's exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day.

The book is almost dizzily optimistic about India and China, about what flattening will bring to these parts of the world.
I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt. Bill Gates has a nice line: He says, 20 years ago, would you rather have been a B-student in Poughkeepsie or a genius in Shanghai? Twenty years ago you'd rather be a B-student in Poughkeepsie. Today?

Not even close.
Not even close. You'd much prefer to be the genius in Shanghai because you can now export your talents anywhere in the world.

As optimistic as you are about that kid in Shanghai, you're not particularly optimistic about the US.
I'm worried about my country. I love America. I think it's the best country in the world. But I also think we're not tending to our sauce. I believe that we are in what Shirley Ann Jackson [president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] calls a "quiet crisis." If we don't change course now and buckle down in a flat world, the kind of competition our kids will face will be intense and the social implications of not repairing things will be enormous.

You quote a CEO who says that Americans have grown addicted to their high salaries, and now they're going to have to earn them. Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?
Somebody said to me the other day that - I wish I had this for the book, but it's going to be in the paperback - the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

Let's talk about the critics of globalization. You say that you don't want the antiglobalization movement to go away. Why?
I've been a critic of the antiglobalization movement, and they've been a critic of me, but the one thing I respect about the movement is their authentic energy. These are not people who don't care about the world. But if you want to direct your energy toward helping the poor, I believe the best way is not throwing a stone through a McDonald's window or protesting World Bank meetings. It's through local governance. When you start to improve local governance, you improve education, women's rights, transportation.

It's possible to go through your book and conclude it was written by a US senator who wants to run for president. There's a political agenda in this book.
Yes, absolutely.

You call for portable benefits, lifelong learning, free trade, greater investment in science, government funding for tertiary education, a system of wage insurance. Uh, Mr. Friedman, are you running for president?
[Laughs loudly.] No, I am not running for president!

Would you accept the vice presidential nomination?
I just want to get my Thursday column done!

But you are outlining an explicit agenda.
You can't be a citizen of this country and not be in a hair-pulling rage at the fact that we're at this inflection moment and nobody seems to be talking about the kind of policies we need to get through this flattening of the world, to get the most out of it and cushion the worst. We need to have as focused, as serious, as energetic, as sacrificing a strategy for dealing with flatism as we did for communism. This is the challenge of our day.

Short of Washington fully embracing the Friedman doctrine, what should we be doing? For instance, what advice should we give to our kids?
When I was growing up, my parents told me, "Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving." I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

Think about your own childhood for a moment. If a teenage Tommy Friedman could somehow have been transported to 2005, what do you think he would have found most surprising?
That you could go to PGA.com and get the scores of your favorite golfer in real time. That would have been amazing.

The 10 Great Levelers

1. Fall of the Berlin Wall
The events of November 9, 1989, tilted the worldwide balance of power toward democracies and free markets.

2. Netscape IPO
The August 9, 1995, offering sparked massive investment in fiber-optic cables.

3. Work flow software
The rise of apps from PayPal to VPNs enabled faster, closer coordination among far-flung employees.

4. Open-sourcing
Self-organizing communities, � la Linux, launched a collaborative revolution.

5. Outsourcing
Migrating business functions to India saved money and a third world economy.

6. Offshoring
Contract manufacturing elevated China to economic prominence.

7. Supply-chaining
Robust networks of suppliers, retailers, and customers increased business efficiency. See Wal-Mart.

8. Insourcing
Logistics giants took control of customer supply chains, helping mom-and-pop shops go global. See UPS and FedEx.

9. In-forming
Power searching allowed everyone to use the Internet as a "personal supply chain of knowledge." See Google.

10. Wireless
Like "steroids," wireless technologies pumped up collaboration, making it mobile and personal.

For Kenzie