In his latest gem-encrusted masterpiece, Tom Friedman takes aim at a basic mathematical concept when he declares that”average is over.” He then proceeds to demonstrate that he doesn’t understand how averages work.
I’ve been arguing for a while now that “average is over.” It has to be when every boss has cheaper, easier, faster access to software, automation, robots, cheap foreign labor and cheap foreign genius that can produce above-average so easily. Everyone needs to find their unique value-add, their “extra,” and be constantly re-engineering themselves if they want to obtain, or advance in, a decent job that can’t be digitized.
Consider this article published in The New York Times on April 23: “EASTON, N.Y. — Something strange is happening at farms in upstate New York. The cows are milking themselves. Desperate for reliable labor and buoyed by soaring prices, dairy operations across the state are charging into a brave new world of udder care: robotic milkers, which feed and milk cow after cow without the help of a single farmhand.”
Overnight, an average farmhand went from knowing how to milk a cow to having to learn how to program and operate the robotic cow-milker — to keep a job. That takes above-average skills.
Average cannot be over. The average can move, and any individual’s position on the distribution relative to the average can change. But there will always be an average. Friedman is like the living embodiment of that Garrison Keillor joke about the town where all the children are above average. Tom: if everyone learns how to program and operate the robotic cow-milker, that becomes an average skill, and whatever economic advantage accrued to that skill will disappear. If everyone actually had “their ‘extra,'” then it wouldn’t be an extra. The sentence “Everyone needs to find their unique value-added” might as well be the sentence “I do not know what the word ‘unique’ means.” You can tell individuals to get ahead and say screw the rest and blather on about unique value-added skill sets. But those everyones just don’t work, Tommie.
If you teach every kid to code, there’s no value in knowing how to code. If a college education becomes a universal public good, it’s great for democracy, for our communal intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment, and for the moral principle of equal opportunity to explore, think, and create. But it means there’s no more economic value in having a college education. Average may be over, Tom, but the three sigma rule sure isn’t, and so what are you gonna do about the 68% of people who are always going to be pretty close to average?
I think he meant not literally that average is over, but that planning to be satisfied by being average is over. Of course, what he can’t say because it would go against the Tom Friedman brand of optimism, but is a corollary with his idea, is “the average person is screwed.”
That makes sense, and I agree that’s likely what he means, but again, he’s explicitly speaking to “everyone.” And that does not scan, at all. And more to the point, the mechanism he thinks is a way to pursue being above-average, getting more skills and knowledge, becomes less effective the more people pursue it.
His argument is tough to follow, but I interpreted it as “everyone needs to find something that they are better-than-average at doing because no one will hire you to do an average job at something”. As you noted, that perspective cuts against the idea of more standardization in education. Getting more skills and knowledge only becomes less effective when more people are pursuing them when everyone is pursuing the same skills and the same knowledge.
Your excerpt of his statement makes perfect sense to me. Of course, you are correct both that the mathematical concept of average will always exist and that there will be job seekers whose skills are close to this average, but I would interpret his claim as the observation that hiring is moving away from a single-dimensional (or few-dimensional) notion of applicant quality (when you often have to make do with average because the above-average are in high demand and low supply, almost by definition) to a high-dimensional notion (in which it is possible for every applicant to be above average, albeit not in all dimensions).
You bring up 3-sigma; I counter with “Curse of Dimensionality” [1]. If, instead of comparing a single Gaussian distribution, you compare hundreds of independent ones (okay, the independent isn’t actually realized in practice, but the naive Bayes assumption [2] works terrifyingly well), the vast majority of people will have be above average in _some_ of those dimensions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_Bayes_classifier
I don’t believe that the vast majority of people will be above average in dimensions that are monetizable or attractive to employers. Indeed: we’re in the midst of a great “standardization” movement, in education and labor, where we’re looking at fewer and fewer metrics of skills, not more, and Tom Friedman is a vocal champion of precisely the education reform movement that pushes that standardization. This is an argument for, if not the 1%, than the 5%, masquerading as an argument for everyone.
I was struck after reading the Friedman essay, how similar it (and other Friedmanian writing was to this Foucault quote on Gary Becker (via Kieran Healy.) I think Foucault really got how the neoliberal ideal of homo entrepreneuris would expand to wash over much of the rest of the culture:
“… The stake in all neo-liberal analyses is the replacement every time of homo economicus as partner of exchange with a homo economicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings. … So, we arrive at this idea that the wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allocated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer.”
The correlary to this, however, is that most entrepreneurial ventures go bankrupt; we should expect that most if not all people will not be able to “support themselves” through labor in the medium term. Socialism in one form or another is pretty much inevitable.
What’s the point of this persnickety, overwrought hair-splitting? “Average is over” sounds much better than “Median is Over,” because most people take average to mean median , the phrase “average is over” functions as a callback to all the previous uses of the phrase since Cowen published his book in 2013, and because “average” is iambic but “median” is not and “average” and “over” are slightly alliterative. Excoriating Thomas Friedman is literally shooting fish in a barrel.
Well, first, no, it’s not literally that. More importantly: the notion that all people are going to become above average in skills and abilities that are attractive to employers is a farcical bit of Pollyanna nonsense deployed for the specific aim of resisting the redistributive economic schemes that are the only path to an equitable society.
I agree with your critique of Freidman, but I think your last paragraph is wrong because it mixes relative value and absolute value.
Developed economies are only possible thanks to widespread skills, the most basic of which being literacy. The pool of truly widely held skills is fairly small, but there’s any number of common-place skills that still provide economic utility even though they don’t directly give you an edge (they may boost up your more unique skills, but, as you say, only helps if you have them).
To anticipate a likely objection, the problem is that people have no ability to capture most of the gains from skills that boost the overall economy but don’t provide them with a personal edge. If you’ve already got yours, for example you are an op-ed columnist for the New York Times or a think tanker that likes commenting on blogs during lunch, that’s not a big deal. You can better pursue your goals and dreams by picking up relevant new support skills. However, for those unemployed, struggling, or facing stagnant wages, this advice is just another way to turn up the speed on the treadmill.
However, while I think that is consistent with your conclusion, I still disagree with your last paragraph. The problem isn’t that commonplace skills don’t add value, it’s that you don’t get to keep most of the value that’s added, particularly when we’re at well below full employment.
Yeah that’s probably a much better way of putting it.
My guess is that Friedman understands all this perfectly well but thinks he’s being clever. He’s not, nor insightful, and I never read him unless linked to by a blogger I happen to be reading, but that’s his style.
Tom: if everyone learns how to program and operate the robotic cow-milker, that becomes an average skill, and whatever economic advantage accrued to that skill will disappear.
I think the ‘average is over’ meme is that everyone will NOT learn how to program and operate the robotic cow-milker. What will happen is out of 10 people, only 1 will do so. In that new world only 1 person will work with milking cows whereas before there was 9. Those 9 people will either not work or have to go off and find some ‘special’ niche to employ themselves with.
That makes a lot more sense to me. But Friedman has to actually come out and say that.
Thanks, I agree he could have phrased it much better. But it’s a concept that I think shouldn’t be dismissed.
In the old world, ‘average’ was ok. If you had 10 cow milkers who were all above even with each other even a 10% decline in demand couldn’t cause much change. Maybe 1 milker would be laid off. If you were an average, or even slightly below average milker you probably had little to really worry about.
In the ‘over’ world you have a lot to worry about. Even if there’s no drop in milk demand, even if there’s more demand for milk, 90% of milkers are doomed. If you’re not the best, might as well get out now since even above average won’t cut it.
Professional sports has been like this a long time. Being above average or even well above average at golf, football, baseball, etc. means very little. Only the top 1% or so who are really good can make a serious living at it.
So in the ‘average is over’ world this model now applies to jobs that used to have plenty of room for ‘average players’ (typists, lawyers, paralegals, medical assistants, accountants, analysts etc.).
Is this correct? I’m not really sure. It’s easy to find examples of it but I’m not yet fully convinced that we’ve achieved such a society or are close to it. It’s interesting to note that this is what you’d expect to see if we got close to a ‘post-scarcity’ society. In the Star Trek world, there’s no point trying to be, say, a chef, unless you’re a great chef. Otherwise what’s the point when the replicator can just as easily make any dish as well as a human?
To be fair to Friedman though, I think the rise of the “Friedman is an idiot” cottage industry means that by now there are probably as many people reading him to rubberneck at the trainwreck as to actually gain some kind of insight.
Can’t let his loyal readers down!
Tom Friedman’s writing and thinking is, as ever, muddled. Forced to re-write his column on deadline to salvage something that might be true, I’d say that everyone needs to focus on finding their *comparative advantage*. I think that’s maybe the concept Friedman was grasping after?