It’s A Small(er) World, After All

I’ve just returned from six weeks of travel on three different continents, and one thing I’ve noticed for sure: The world is getting smaller. I don’t mean that global warming is actually shrinking the planet (although it may be, for all I know), but that more people are traveling, and once-exotic locations are now becoming as tourist-frequented as Disneyland during President’s Week. Part of this is due to the phenomenon described in Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. As the tiger economies of India, China and other once-developing nations are swelling their ranks with educated middle-class consumers, those consumers want to get out and travel, just like us.