His thesis is that we are now competing with people all over the globe ... and in just about every occupation. While many in my generation, growing up in the depopulated coal towns of the 1950s and 1960s, were glad just to be going off to college --- any college --- many of our kids are competing furiously to gain admission to one of the highly-selective top-tier schools. In my heyday, a law or accounting degree --- from any law or business school --- guaranteed a fat living and the community's respect. Today, not only is the nation top-heavy with attorneys and accountants, that professions have lost much of the respect they once enjoyed before Enron. But many law and CPA firms are actually outsourcing work, formerly done by the firm's associate attorneys, paralegals and account execs, to lawyers and accountants in India who work for one-tenth to one-third the salary.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement was ratified by the Senate 11 years ago, Bill Clinton assured us that, while American manufacturing jobs would head south of the border, they would be replaced by more sophisticated occupations, such as computer programming. And, indeed, hundreds of thousands of workers, who lost their assembly-line spots to Mexican competitors, were retrained at Uncle Sam's expense. Meanwhile, many of these Mexican manufacturing jobs have relocated once again, this time to Asian locales such as China, South Vietnam, and Cambodia. And, guess what? Many of the software development jobs have left the U.S. for India. In fact, a diaspora of American-educated Indian software specialists has happened, as these computer specialists concluded that they can live better on half their American salaries, if they move back home to India.

Still, despite all this globalization of what once was an American/European monopoly, we remain --- by and large --- better off than most of the rest of the world. The old folk singer Pete Seeger once said, "It seems as if half the people in the world are overworked and the other half are unemployed." He wasn't far of the mark, and he's still right today. Consider Iran, where voters are about to elect (or re-elect) a president. One in four Iranian workers is currently unemployed. Many itinerant day-laborers, who crowd street corners, hoping to be selected for a day's manual labor, tell reporters and pollsters they see no hope from either presidential candidate.

And, yet, even Iran appears prosperous compared to such dregs of the economic world as equatorial Africa, where millions subsist on a dollar or two a day and AIDS decimates the population.

The cover of Friedman's book shows a Medieval ship dropping off the edge of the earth, which is what many mariners of the Middle Ages thought would happen if they sailed too far West from Europe. Are we headed for disaster? I think maybe so ... because we aren't so much sailing toward the rim of a flat world as we are banging around inside a box. Whichever way we turn, we hit a flat wall. For instance:

Economic growth means more pollution, which means accelerated global warming. If you don't believe in global warming, check out this National Geographic article on the web: http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0409/feature1/

We're boxed in where immigration is concerned, too. Conservative estimates place the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. at around 10 million, mostly Mexicans. People are Mexico's major export, yielding our southern neighbor more hard currency than that country's oil production provides. Even if the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency had the people-power to do it, we couldn't round up these folks and ship them home without hopelessly destabilizing the Mexican government and economy. Many American employers, trying to meet Asian competition with cheap off-the-books illegals, would resist the ICE effort anyway. With 6.1 billion of us swarming the planet, and a projected population increase of two billion over the next decade or so, massive (legal and illegal) movements of people will remain a fact of human life.

And then there's the Bomb. Since the Cold War concluded 15 years ago, we've stopped talking about nuclear war for the most part. For the past four years our focus --- some might say our obsession --- has been with terrorism. Meanwhile, Iran with its 25 percent unemployment rate and fanatical, American-hating ayatollahs is within a whisker of joining the nuclear club. China is in the atomic fraternity and building missiles that can reach us. North Korea says the Bomb is an essential alternative to becoming the next Iraq on Uncle Sam's list. In brief, our biggest economic competitor (which practically wiped out the last shreds of our garment industry by dumping jeans and other clothing on our retail markets this year), and two of the top American-hating rogue states in the world are all in the club or banging hard on its front door. We can't fight them all and we can never feel safe while any of them have the big firecracker.

Starting to feel that box closing around you like the Star Wars garbage compactor? All I can say is, Mr. Friedman, I wish the world was simply flat.

Jim Castagnera is a lawyer and journalist, who lives and writes in Havertown.