Making Connections Between Three Authors - Essay Example

??of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for horizontal collaboration—that I believe is the most important force shaping global politics and economics in the early 21st century (Friedman, 7).” Friedman also warns that Americans need to keep up, or get out of the game. “There is no sugar coating on this: in a flat world, every individual is going to have to run a little faster if he or she wants to advance his or her standard of living (Friedman, 10).” Still, some low-income groups of Americans are at a disadvantage and succumb to the “roundness” of the bygone American world.

Though countries like China and India are exploding ahead politically and technologically, African Americans and people of color in the United States have little opportunity to do the same. According to Barbara Ehrenreich’s article “Maid to Order” and William Julius Wilson’s book When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, the world is definitively not flat, but limited to the socio-economic imprisonment of the lower urban class. Both Barbara Ehrenreich’s article “Maid to Order” and William Julius Wilson’s book When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor show a rethinking of the mostly-optimistic approach Friedman has towards the “flat,” expansionist and technologically forward view of the world.

“Maid to Order” discusses the trials and tribulations of being a maid, and the sorry, anti-feminist history behind the booming industry of domestic work. “In a society in which 40 percent of the wealth is owned by 1 percent of the households while the bottom 20 percent reports negative assets, the degradation of others is readily purchased (Ehrenreich, 1).” This degradation comes in the form of racism, sexism and classism that has been an American mainstay since the turn of the century.

“So the insight that distinguished the more radical, post-Friedan cohort of feminist was that when we talk about