When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, what will
they say was the most crucial development in the first few years of the
twenty-first century? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq
war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and
so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services
and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the
world's two biggest nations? And with this "flattening" of the globe, has the
world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and