A few years ago the whole world discovered a hard cover book written by a man with a beard who put an annoying number of tangential details into his book which featured a heavily-Photoshopped image of our planet superimposed onto a quarter on the aforementioned hard cover. Mr. Thomas Friedman wrote "The World is Flat" and everyone seemed to cry "oh yes! have mercy! oh yes!" in agreement. However, a few months later he wrote an article condemning General Motors as a 'crack dealer' who pushed energy consumption as its lethal vice - and a conundrum was born. An article on the cover of Friday's Wall Street Journal described the fall of outsourcing at one Midwestern company, which brought production of its bulky product back to the Midwest from China. The world is getting rounder again.

To be fair, Mr. Friedman argued mostly about the globalization of knowledge industries, but he also assumed that, all things being equal, industry would flow to the lowest-cost areas. However, for any industry to flow anywhere there must be a massive consumption of energy to equip the new location and build connections (be they buried optical fiber or flying carbon fiber), and thus flattening is a crack dealer, too. I think we'll be back to an oblate spheroid in no time, with local industry - knowledge and otherwise - being critical to sustaining our very way of life.