Who said world is not flat

In others, however, such differentials may be the outcome of very specific political decisions to develop one particular part of a country rather than another. In some countries, just one, or perhaps two, major cities dominate; in other countries there is a flatter urban hierarchy and a wider spread of activity among more evenly-sized cities.

Increasingly, however, it is necessary to think of cities as being involved in global networks that transcend national boundaries. Cities differ in importance not only in terms of their population size but also—and more importantly—in terms of the functions they perform and the influence they exert.

In particular, observers of world cities Sassen ; Taylor emphasize the role of high-level service functions financial and business services, in particular and their uneven concentration in certain cities, creating a global hierarchical network. Figures 1 to 4 are merely snapshots at one point in time of what is, of course, a continuously evolving process of shaping and reshaping the global economic map.

Old geographies of production, distribution, and consumption are continuously being disrupted; new geographies are continuously being created.

But the new does not simply obliterate the old. On the contrary, there are complex processes of path dependency at work. What already exists constitutes the pre-conditions on which the new develops. Traces of earlier patterns of geographical specialization continue to influence what is happening today.

Some core economies experienced a progressive decline to semi-peripheral status and new economies emerged, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The broad contours of this core-periphery global economic map persisted until the outbreak of the Second World War in Japan produced only 3. Since then, there has been a truly fundamental transformation of the world economy.

A new geo-economic map has come into being, which, although bearing traces of the contours of the old map, is far more complex than it was even a few decades ago. Geographically, the global economy has become increasingly multi-polar.

New centers of production—new geographical divisions of labor—have emerged in parts of what had been, historically, the periphery and semi-periphery of the world economy. Much of this was due to the relative economic decline of China and India. Today, it is on the way back up again at seemingly breakneck speed. At the same time, many parts of the world remain, to a greater or lesser degree, disarticulated from the engines of economic growth.

The contours of the global economic map, therefore, depict a landscape of staggeringly high peaks of affluence and deep troughs of deprivation interspersed with plains of greater or lesser degrees of prosperity. First, we can identify increasing geographical dispersal, as new centers of production, trade, and investment have emerged. But the extent of such dispersal remains relatively limited and extremely uneven. Globalization has not resulted in a universal evening out of economic activities.

The second tendency, therefore, is the persistence of a high level of geographical concentration. Processes of localization of economic activities remain very powerful. Indeed, the clustering or geographical concentration of activities not only persists; it is the norm.

Even such activities as financial services that, from a purely technological point of view, could be located anywhere, remain highly geographically concentrated in a small number of major global cities. In the previous section, we explored the changing contours of the global economic map, noting its immense geographical unevenness and temporal volatility.

Such dynamic geographies of globalization are the outcome of extremely complex actions and relationships between economic, political, and social institutions and actors, all of which are deeply grounded and embedded in specific geographical structures. The nature of that grounding—the contexts in which they are created—is highly significant in influencing though not determining how such processes develop and how actors behave.

Figure 5 provides a synoptic perspective on the major actors and processes involved. It emphasizes the essentially networked nature of the global economy, one that conceives of economic processes production, distribution, and consumption in terms of connections of activities, linked through flows of both material and non-material phenomena like services into circuits and networks.

Of course, such networks do not exist in isolation. They are embedded within the broader macro-structures of the global economy as well as grounded in the prevailing geographical structures of the real world. The macro-structures of the global economy are the institutions, conventions and rules of the capitalist market system.

These global governance institutions are, themselves, only a part of the broader socio-cultural matrix of practices, rules, and conventions that shape how the capitalist market economy works on the ground.

These rules and conventions relate to, for example, private property, profit-making, resource allocation on the basis of market signals, and the consequent commodification of production inputs including labor.

Such institutions and conventions continue to be manifested in specific configurations in specific places notably within national-states, but not only at that scale. In other words, they are territorially embedded. The geography of capitalism in the global economy, therefore, is highly variegated.

It is emphatically not the same everywhere. Within this geographically differentiated macro-structural framework, it is primarily the actions of, and especially, the interactions between, the five actor-centered networks shown in the central section of figure 5 that shape the changing geographical configuration of the global economy at different spatial scales.

Such interactions are sometimes conflictual, sometimes collaborative but, overall, the system is one in which power relationships tend to be asymmetrical. Some actors are, without doubt, more influential and powerful than others, notably transnational corporations and states. The production of any commodity, whether it is a manufactured product or a service, involves an intricate articulation of individual activities and transactions across space and time.

Such production networks—the nexus of interconnected functions and operations through which goods and services are produced and distributed—have become both organizationally and geographically more complex. Figure 6 presents a highly simplified picture of a basic production circuit. Individual production circuits are, themselves, enmeshed in broader networks of inter- and intra-firm relationships.

Such networks are, in reality, extremely complex structures with intricate links—horizontal, vertical, diagonal—forming multi-dimensional, multi-layered lattices of economic activity.

They reflect the fact that many production processes can be fragmented and separated out, either organizationally, geographically, or both. Global production networks GPNs not only connect firms into broader organizational structures including alliances and customer-supplier relationships but they also integrate national and local economies into such networks.

Such interconnections have huge implications for the economic well-being of particular places. At the same time, the specific characteristics of national and local economies influence the operation and form of larger-scale processes. The process is especially complex because, while states and local economies are essentially territorially specific, production networks themselves are not. Production networks slice through boundaries in highly differentiated ways, influenced in part by regulatory and non-regulatory barriers and by local socio-cultural conditions, to create structures that are discontinuously territorial.

This has major implications for the relative bargaining powers of the actors involved. The geo-economy, therefore, can be pictured as a geographically uneven, highly complex, and dynamic web of production networks, economic spaces, and places connected together through threads of flows. It involves the linking together of two sets of networks: organizational in the form of production circuits and networks and geographical in the form of localized clusters of economic activity at different geographical scales.

Global production networks are coordinated and regulated primarily by transnational corporations TNCs. These are firms that have the power to coordinate and control operations in more than one country, even if they do not own those assets. It is shaped, too, by the resulting flows—of materials, components, finished products, technological, and organizational expertise, finance—between their geographically dispersed operations. Although the relative importance of TNCs varies considerably—from sector to sector, from country to country, and between different parts of the same country—there are now very few parts of the world in which TNC influence, whether direct or indirect, is not important.

Theoretically, at one extreme, the whole TNC production network may be internalized within the firm as a vertically-integrated system crossing national boundaries. At the other extreme, each function may be performed by separate firms.

This dichotomy—between externalized, market-governed transactions and internalized, hierarchically-governed transactions—grossly simplifies the richness and diversity of the governance mechanisms in the contemporary economy.

In fact, there is a spectrum of different forms of coordination, consisting of networks of interrelationships within and between firms. Such networks increasingly consist of a mix of intra-firm and inter-firm structures.

These networks are dynamic and in a continuous state of flux; the boundary between internalization and externalization is continually shifting. They are also affected by the shifting power relationships between firms within a GPN. In some cases, one dominant actor calls all the shots; in other cases, power may be more widely dispersed with a greater degree of collaboration involved.

Capital, it is often argued, has become hyper-mobile, freed from the tyranny of distance and no longer tied to place. But such seductive ideas are highly misleading. The world is both a space of places and a place of flows. Every component in a global production network—every firm, every economic function—is, quite literally, grounded in specific locations.

Such grounding is both physical in the form of the built environment and also less tangible in the form of localized social relationships and in distinctive institutions and cultural practices.

Hence, the precise nature and articulation of firm-centered production networks are deeply influenced by the concrete socio-political, institutional, and cultural contexts within which they are embedded, produced, and reproduced. This is not to claim that TNCs from a particular national origin are identical. This is self-evidently not the case. But, in general, the similarities between TNCs from one country will be greater than the differences between them Dicken , The national state continues to be the most important bounded territorial form in which production networks are embedded.

The international institutions themselves exist only because they are sanctioned by national states; sub-national institutions are commonly subservient to the national level, although the situation is more complex in federal political systems. As we have seen, the number of national states has grown markedly in the past twenty years.

Global production networks, by definition, have to operate within multi-scalar regulatory systems. They are, therefore, subject to a multiplicity of geographically variable political, social, and cultural influences. In other words, the geo-economy is essentially being structured and restructured not only by the actions of either firms or states alone but also by complex, dynamic interactions between the two sets of institutions.

Of course, TNCs and states are not the only actors involved in the operation of global production networks. They are continuously engaged in relationships with other major actors—labor, consumers, civil society organizations—some of which also have strong territorial bases. Each of the actors and institutions involved has their own agendas. The extent to which these can be realized depends on the relative power configuration in specific situations.

Significant variables in determining relative power are, first, control over key assets such as capital, technology, knowledge, labor skills, natural resources, consumer markets and, second, the spatial and territorial range and flexibility of each of the actors. The two are not unconnected. Ability to control access to specific assets is a major bargaining strength.

Where such assets are available virtually everywhere, then the power gradient is shallow or even non-existent. However, actors able to tap into localized assets across geographical space have a significant advantage over those without such spatial flexibility. Power relationships within global production networks are highly asymmetrical.

But there is a further dimension. Each of the major actors in GPNs is involved in both cooperation and collaboration on the one hand, and in conflict and competition on the other. Such apparently paradoxical behavior warns us against assuming that relationships between certain actors are always of one kind: for example, that those between, TNCs, or between TNCs and states, or between TNCs and labor, or between TNCs and CSOs are always either conflictual or competitive.

Or, conversely, that relationships between groups of workers or labor organizations are always cooperative in the name of class solidarity.

Not so. These various actor-networks are imbued with an ever-changing mixture of both conflict and collaboration. Thus, although power relationships within global production networks are asymmetrical they are not fixed.

So, for example, TNCs in the same industry are fierce competitors but also, invariably, enmeshed in a complex web of collaborative relationships. States compete in cut-throat fashion with other states to entice internationally-mobile investment by TNCs or to find ways to keep out certain types of imports whilst, at the same time, increasingly engaging in preferential trading arrangements, including bilateral and multilateral agreements, often within broader regional groupings.

Labor unions in one country engage in competition with labor unions in other countries in the scramble for new, or to protect existing, jobs whilst, at the same time, unions strive to create international alliances with unions in other countries, especially those involved in the geographically-dispersed operations of major TNCs.

Civil society organizations, likewise, are not immune from these conflicting actions. In the context of the anti-globalization protests, for example, CSOs have developed collaborations across national boundaries but, at the same time, the goals and values of individual CSOs are not always compatible, to say the least. My central argument is that the reshaping of the global economic map is being driven increasingly by the emergence of extremely complex organizational and geographical networks of production, distribution, and consumption.

The precise form of such networks—how they are controlled and coordinated, as well as the shape and extent of their specific geographies—varies enormously. Each stage in a production circuit each node in a global production network, creates value through the combined application of labor skills, process and product technologies, and the organizational expertise involved in coordinating complex production and logistical processes and in marketing and distribution.

But when we turn to value capture the situation is far more complicated. Who benefits from value creation and enhancement?

This raises issues way beyond the narrow confines of firm competitiveness and profitability to encompass all the different stakeholders involved in global production networks in different geographical locations. The key issue is the configuration of power within GPNs, which, as we have seen already, tends to be highly asymmetrical and subject to complex bargaining processes.

One dimension of this is the relationship between capital and labor. The shadow moves as time passes which is the principle for ancient Shadow Clocks.

If the world had been flat, then two sticks in different locations would produce the same shadow:. This is because the Earth is round, and not flat:. Eratosthenes BCE used this principle to calculate the circumference of the Earth quite accurately. To see this demonstrated, refer to my experiment video about Eratosthenes and the circumference of the Earth.

Standing on a flat plateau, you look ahead toward the horizon. You strain your eyes, then take out your favorite binoculars and stare through them, as far as your eyes with the help of the binocular lenses can see. Next, climb up the closest tree—the higher the better, just be careful not to drop those binoculars and break their lenses.

Then look again, strain your eyes, and stare through the binoculars out to the horizon. The higher up you climb, the farther you will see. Even if you stood on a completely clear plateau with no obstacles between you and the horizon, you would see much farther from the greater height than you would on the ground. This phenomenon is caused by the curvature of the Earth as well, and would not happen if the Earth was flat:. The Earth is different from other planets, that much is true.

However, there are certain characteristics all planets have, and it will be quite logical to assume that if all planets behave a certain way, or show certain characteristics—specifically if those planets are in different places or were created under different circumstances—our planet is the same.

In , Galileo Galilei observed the moons of Jupiter rotating around it. He described them as small planets orbiting a larger planet—a description and observation that was very difficult for the church to accept, as it challenged a geocentric model where everything was supposed to revolve around the Earth.

This observation also showed that the planets Jupiter, Neptune, and later Venus was observed too are all spherical, and all orbit the sun. A flat planet ours or any other planet would be such an incredible observation that it would pretty much go against everything we know about how planets form and behave. We know it. The time in New York, at the moment these words are written, is pm.

It may not take much technology to understand that Earth is not perfectly round, but it takes quite a bit of effort and equipment to determine its true shape. Charles Q. Choi is a frequent contributor to Scientific American. In his spare time, he has traveled to all seven continents.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American.

Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up.