Data Continues to be Important

People often make statements and provide no clue as to how they arrived at their position.  If no data is provided we might say that they are leaning heavily on ethos, in other words, their reputation.  They appear to be informed, have a position and folk have come to believe that what they say is probably accurate, because of their ethos. (Ethos--what to others we appear to be.)

Pankaj Ghemawat, an economist, has been studying the cross-boundary activities of people in an attempt to better understand the extent to which our planet has become borderless.  His findings are very interesting and they run counter to the ideas presented in the best seller book written by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century.  The book is popular and has contributed extensively to the idea that the world is becoming borderless and therefore is flat. 

Watch and listen to Ghemawat as he presents data that indicates that we indeed have boarders and that thinking that we don't may be impeding our progress to important world solutions.