Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide To Thriving In The Age Of Accelerations

Thomas L. Friedman, “Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide To Thriving In The Age Of Accelerations”  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, 461 pp.

This book is the same genre as two books I read in the 70’s: Future Shock and Third Wave.  Anyone reading this book will be reminded of these previous books detailing the acceleration of change we were then going through and are presently going through; albeit much faster now. The author defines 2007 as the greatest inflection point of changes occurring in the three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change.  It is the core argument of this book that these three simultaneous accelerations in the Market constitute the age of accelerations, in which we now find ourselves.  This book receives my “Education” tag, reserved for books I judge very important in my understanding of what is going on.

My Notes:

Pg. 3:  It’s no surprise so many people feel fearful or unmoored these days.  Friedman argues that we are living through one of the greatest inflection points in history—perhaps unequaled since the invention of printing that paved the way for the Reformation.  The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once. 

Pg. 13:  The Machine:  the author uses this term to describe the economy.  The Machine is being driven by simultaneous accelerations in technology, globalization, and climate change, all interacting with one another.

Pg. 20:   In 2007 when Steven Jobs introduced the iPhone it marked the pivotal junction in the history of technology—and the world.  Because not just the iPhone emerged in 2007, a whole group of companies emerged with new innovations that have reshaped how people and machines communicate, create, collaborate, and think.  In 2007, development began on an open-source platform for writing and collaborating on software, called GitHub that would vastly expand the ability of software to start ‘eating the world.’  Facebook started in 2006, Twitter in 2007, YouTube 2006, Android 2007, Kindle 2007 released;  & in 2007 Airbnb conceived. 

Pg. 25:  Moore’s Law:  Moore first postulated in 1965 that computational processing power would double roughly every year (later changed to 18 months).  To illustrate what this means, the author recalled the famous legend of the king who was so impressed with the man who invented the game of chess that he offered him any reward.  The inventor chose to have the king simply place a single grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard and then double it on subsequent squares.  The king agreed without realizing that sixty-three instances of doubling yields a ridiculously big number: something like eighteen quintillion grains of rice.  That is the power of exponential change.  However, we are now on the second part of the 63-piece chessboard with computer processing capability continuing to grow as described by Moore’s law so many years ago. (take 2 to the 32nd power).

Pg. 29:  The exponential growth of scientific and technological progress could be best displayed on a Y-axis line (time on X-axis) of a graph beginning with the introduction of the printing press, then the telegraph, the manual typewriter, the Telex, the mainframe computer, the first word processors, the PC, the Internet, the laptop, the mobile phone, search mobile apps, big data, virtual reality, human-genome sequencing, artificial intelligence, and the self-driving car.  Note, that a thousand years ago the curve representing scientific and technological progress rose so gradually that it could take one hundred years for the world to look and feel different.  Nothing scaled globally all at once as it does today.

Pg. 49:  From sensors on cows and analyzation of big data it was discovered that within a sixteen-hour ideal window for artificial insemination, if you performed that function in the first four hours, there was a ‘seventy percent probability you got a female calf, and if you did it in the second four hours there was a higher probability that you got a male.

Pg. 59:  With the advent of digital information, the recording, storage, and dissemination of information has become practically free.  This surge in available information has not similarly happened since books became popular in the fifteenth century, moving cultural knowledge from the human brain into a printed form. 

Pg. 81:  Review of acceleration:  2G was voice and data, with simple texting but not through the Internet; 3G was connecting to the Internet but at a level of speed and clumsiness that recalled the days when you needed a dial-up modem to get online; 4G wireless, the current standard, is as seamless as broadband connectivity over a landline, with particularly seamless access for data-hungry applications such as video. 

Pg. 83:  Historically, only a few energy sources fundamentally changed everything for most everyone—fire, electricity, and computing.  And now with the cloud, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that it’s becoming more profound than fire and electricity.  Now we can connect to all the world’s knowledge and all the world’s people. 

Pg. 93:  Between 2000 and 2007 we entered a world where connectivity was fast, free, easy for you, and invisible.  Computing became so powerful and so cheap and so effortless that it suffused itself into every device and every aspect of our lives and our society.

Pg. 95:  Economist Robert Gordon has made a compelling case in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, (I read and reported on this book in 2016) that the days of steadily rising growth are probably behind us.  He convincingly believes all the big gains were made in the special century between 1870 and 1970—with the likes of automobiles, radio, television, indoor plumbing, electrification, vaccines, clean water, air travel, central heating, women’s empowerment, and air-conditioning and antibiotics.  He is skeptical that today’s new technologies will ever produce another leap forward in productivity comparable to that special century. 

Pg. 97:  Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles.  Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content.  Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory.  And Airbnb the world’s largest accommodation provider, own no real estate.  Something interesting is happening.

Pg. 103:  In the twenty-first century, knowing all the answers won’t distinguish someone’s intelligence—rather, the ability to ask AI (Artificial Intelligence) devices the right questions will be the mark of true genius.

Pg. 149:  Cultures that can handle and take advantage of contact between strangers and their strange ideas will drive a lot of history in the age of accelerations.  Those societies that are most open to flows of trade, information, finance, culture, or education, and those most willing to learn from others and contribute to them, are the ones most likely to thrive in the age of acceleration.  Those that can’t will struggle. (You think this is a dig at the Trumpettes?)

Pg. 161:  From a January 7, 2016, Bloomberg.com article:  CO₂ is entering the atmosphere about 100 times faster than it did when the planet emerged from the most recent ice age, about 12,000 years ago.  The concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere is now 35 percent higher than its peak for the last 800,000 years.  Sea-levels are higher than they’ve been in 115,000 years, and the rise is accelerating. 

Pg. 162:  The Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, but the fossil record shows signs of simple life starting only about 3.8 billion years ago, and complex life forms only about 560 million years ago.  Over the millennia, life forms have changed and evolved, depending on the epoch.  For the last 11,500 years or so, geologists tell us, we have been in the Holocene epoch which followed the Pleistocene epoch, also known as the Great Ice Age.  It is only this last 11,000 years that we on earth have enjoyed the calm, stable climate conditions that allowed our ancestors to emerge from their Paleolithic caves and create seasonal agriculture, domesticate animals, erect cities and towns, and eventually launch the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the information technology revolution.

Pg. 169ff:  Author has extensive coverage of climate change in this section.  Note: it is only beyond the mid-twentieth century that there is clear evidence for fundamental shifts in the state and functioning of the Earth System that are (1) beyond the range of variability of the Holocene, and (2) driven by human activities and not by natural variability.

Pg. 175:  The planet’s total population will rise from about 7.2 billion today to about 9.7 billion by 2050.  World population was 3 billion in 1959 and 6 billion in 1999.

Pg. 224:  A recent study found that a majority of jobs on offer today don’t require a four-year college degree, and nine out of the top ten jobs in America by volume don’t require more than a high school degree.  Also, just showing up and having a pulse is not enough for entry-level jobs.  The whole employment system is set up to fend off unqualified applicants.  See website at LearnUp for a website constructed to help those applying for a job.  (I just didn't understand this statistic and don't necessarily believe it??  It just didn't fit the context of this book.)

Pg. 227:  Maybe the most popular intelligent assistant in the world today is Khan Academy, which was started in 2006, and offers free, short YouTube video lessons in subjects ranging from math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine to finance, history, and more

Pg. 269:  Many states are cracking up from the inside under the pressure of the age of accelerations.  We now have more than thirty civil wars underway in weak states.

Pg. 284:  We have learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan that liberty taking root depends much less on what we do than on what they do.  If they are not ready for democratic institutions, we cannot do it for them.  We cannot transplant a political culture—and particularly an ethic of pluralism—where there is no topsoil of trust.

Pg. 310:  Culture:  what exactly is culture?  Culture is the pattern of responses discovered, developed, or invented during the group’s history of handling problems which arise from interactions among its members, and between them and their environment.  These responses are considered the correct way to perceive, feel, think, and act, and are passed on to the new members through immersion and teaching.  Culture determines what is acceptable or unacceptable, important or unimportant, right or wrong, workable or unworkable. 

Pg. 321:  The Republican Party used to be an incredibly rich polyculture.  It gave us ideas as diverse as our national parks (Teddy Roosevelt); the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (Richard Nixon); radical nuclear arms control and the Montreal Protocol to close the ozone hole (Ronald Reagan; cap-and-trade to curb acid rain (George Bush).  For decades the party itself was a pluralistic amalgam of northern liberal Republicans and southern and western conservatives.  But in recent years the Tea Party and other hyper-conservative forces, also funded in large part by fossil fuel companies and oil billionaires, have tried to wipe out the Republican Party’s once rich polyculture and turn it into a monoculture that’s enormously susceptible to diseased ideas: climate change is a hoax; evolution never happened; we don’t need immigration reform.  All of this weakened the GOP’s foundation and opened the way for an invasive species such as Donald Trump to make deep inroads into its garden.

Pg. 355:  In 2016 world leaders from 175 countries signed the Paris climate agreement.  There is no better example of the choice we now have to either destroy everyone or fix everything than the choice of whether we rise to the challenge of climate change or not.  With the steady drop in the price of renewable energy and efficiency, it now costs the same to destroy the climate or save it.  The price is basically the same, but at the microscale there will be different winners and losers.  Coal and oil companies and traditional utilities will lose out.  Wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and efficient and distributed energy purveyors will win. 

Pg. 395:  The years from 1948 to 1973 have been labeled The Age of Shared Growth.  All three factors—productivity growth, distribution, and participation—aligned to benefit the middle class during this period.  Income inequality fell, with the share of income going to the top 1 percent falling by nearly one-third, while the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent rising 2.8 percent per year throughout the period.  Household income growth was also fueled by the increased participation of women in the workforce. 

Pg. 439:  Embracing diversity today does not mean adopting a globalist multiculturalism that took hold in Europe, where everyone is just left to go their own way and one day you wake up and discover the melting pot is busted and there is no real community.   As Jonathan Haidt in an essay states “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism.”: In the US there are certain bedrock values—regarding how you treat women, the rule of law, other faiths, public institutions, and community spaces—that are non-negotiable.  

Pg. 448:  In the author’s thirty years of reporting from Washington he finds that every passing year American politics more and more resembles the Middle East.  Democrats and Republicans are treating each other just as Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Persians, Israelis and Palestinians do—self-segregating, assuming the worst of each other, and, lately, never wanting one of their kids to marry one of “them.”

Addenda:

Page 328ff:  A made-up Political Party Platform that “Mother Nature” might construct:

1.       Single-payer universal health care funded by a value-added consumption tax (excluding groceries and other necessities).  If a single-payer system can work for Canada, Australia, and Sweden and provide generally better health outcomes at lower prices, it can work for the US, and it would get US companies out of the healthcare business and Medicare out of payroll taxes.

2.      Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, which are essential trampolines to bounce people out of poverty.  (Both are set to expire in 2017).

3.      Support free trade agreements and add wage insurance for workers impacted.

4.      Make all postsecondary education at an accredited offline or online university or technical school fully tax deductible.  Also, move to three-year undergraduate degrees from four.  If universities in Europe, such as Oxford, can do it, so can we.  This would cut the cost by 25%.

5.      Roll back the 2005 reform of the bankruptcy laws, which has hurt start-ups.

6.      We need to tighten security on the 1,945-mile border with Mexico with both more physical fencing and virtual fencing with sensors, etc.  Americans need to believe that they live in a country where the borders are controlled.  We need to control low-skilled immigration so our own low-skilled workers are not priced out of jobs while removing all limits on H-1B visas for foreign high-skilled knowledge workers. 

7.      Put in place new accelerated tax incentives and eliminate regulatory barriers to rapidly scale up the deployment of superfast bandwidth—for both wire and wireless networks. 

8.      

  Borrow $50 billion at today’s almost-zero interest rates to upgrade our ports, airports, and grids and to create jobs.

9.      Bar the manufacture and sale of all semiautomatic and other military-style guns.  Buyback guns like Australia prove can help reduce gun-deaths.

1 Eliminate entirely the corporate income tax, now 35 percent, the highest in the world.   This would eliminate lobbyists gaming the system as they now do.

1Label all sugar drinks and treat the same as cigarettes were. Global costs of diabetes are now estimated at $825 billion a year.  Global diabetes has more than doubled in the last 35 years.

1Review the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting regulations to determine which—if any—of their provisions are needlessly making it harder for entrepreneurs to raise capital or start businesses.  We need to be sure we are preventing recklessness—not risk-taking.

1Create a Regulatory Improvement Commission to review the natural accumulation of federal regulations over time which often imposes unintended but significant cost to businesses and to economic growth. 

1Copy Great Britain and limit national political campaign spending and the length of the national campaign to a period of a few months.  We cannot afford to govern the country for one hundred days every four years and spend the rest of the time preparing for the midterms and presidential campaigns.

1Encourage every state to end gerrymandering, by following California’s move to a nonpartisan commission of retired jurists who draw up congressional districts.  Now candidates in safe districts can only lose to another more conservative Republican or a more liberal Democrat depending on the gerrymandered district.

1Intelligence services must be given all the needed latitude they need to confront today’s cyber-enabled terrorists. 

1Condition foreign aid to developing countries on their making progress on gender equality, and on access for every woman who wants it to family planning technology.  As a global community, we simply cannot afford the population explosions that, in combination with climate change, desertification, and civil strife, are making more and more swaths of the world uninhabitable.

  Addenda 2:-

Man has sped up his own response times. It now takes us only 10-15 years to get used to the sort of technological changes that we used to absorb in a couple of generations; but what good is that when technology becomes obsolete every five to seven years?

While writing this book, Friedman had to interview all the main technologists at least twice, because things changed so quickly. Like everybody else, he has no time to think: The book’s title comes from an offhand comment to a friend whose tardiness allowed a few welcome minutes of contemplation.

The passages that lingered with this reader were the ones about the good old days that have disappeared — when baseball used to be a sport that everybody could afford to watch when local boys like the young Friedman could caddy at the United States Open when everybody in Friedman’s town went to public schools.