Additional Views of the World Stage

Assume Peterson is correct. Engineers who function on the global stage he describes will need many qualities not the least of whieh is a ereative and innovative approach to both technical and non-technical problem solving, problem prevention, and opportunity pursuing. 

Geography professor Harm de Blij (2009), in his book The Power of Place, looks around at the global landscape and ahead at the troubling implications of what he sees. He says The Earth, physically as well as culturally, still is very rough terrain, and in crucial ways its regional compartments continue to trap billions in circumstances that spell disadvantage... The power of place still holds the majority of us in its thrall.  

He partitions the earth s geography into the global core and the periphery. The global core is the urbanized and wealthy portion of the globe comprised of Europe, 

North America, extreme East Asia, and Australia-New Zealand. Everything else is periphery, that is, roughly, Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. 

Approximately 15 percent of the earth s population resides in the global core and they earn nearly 75 percent of the world s annual income. This means that the other 85 percent of the population lives in the periphery of the earth s geography and earn only 25 percent of the world s annual income. Using individual income as the indicator, the haves having an annual per capita income almost twenty times that of the have nots suggests a very un-flat world in contrast with that described by Friedman (2005). 

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