Friedman in the Olive Tree and the Lexus identified the super empowered individual long before anybody was paying attention to Usama bin Laden. He hits a home run just often enough to be relevant. Kind of like a grand slugger in baseball. You want home runs the earned run average is going to be abysmal. But every now and then out of the park. Friedman does that fairly well. I've read all of his books and often find egregious factual errors (e.g. Flat earth and discussion of the beginning of the Internet <shudder>). Hot, flat and crowded was similar. Like all writers. Use what you can and don't sweat the rest.