Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

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		Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
		Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

The groundbreaking follow-up to the New York Times bestseller The Great Stagnation
 
The United States continues to mint more millionaires and billionaires than any country ever. Yet, since the great recession, three quarters of the jobs created here pay only marginally more than minimum wage. Why is there growth only at the top and the bottom?
 
Renowned economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen explains that high earners are taking ever more advantage of machine intelligence and achieving ever-better results. Meanwhile, nearly every business sector relies less and less on manual labor, and that means a steady, secure life somewhere in the middle—average—is over.
 
In Average is Over, Cowen lays out how the new economy works and identifies what workers and entrepreneurs young and old must do to thrive in this radically new economic landscape.

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Tyler Cowen writes the terrific Marginal Revolution blog [...], teaches economics at GMU, and in his spare time writes books. In "Average is Over" Cowen examines the trends of the last 30 years including the introduction of smart technology, polarization of high and low wage earners, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, wage stagnation. Cowen uses the prizm of chess, chess software, and chess software games as both analogy and predictor for future of how technology and technology / human interfaces will evolving and projecting these trends forward into the next 20 - 30 years.

Given the trends from today Cowen's "Average is Over" makes a strong and highly plausible argument for a likely American future. Perhaps even the most likely future.
The good news -
The already expensive, livable, and elite cities become even more so. For those self motivated, hard workers from anywhere in the world and nearly any economic background, the future looks extremely bright. Their tools and access to smarter training gets better and better. Online classes are easy to access worldwide. Smart technology gets smarter becomes "genius" but still works far better with people than without. Productivity (and wages) for these top 10-15% continues to increase. Even if you cannot work with "genius computers" managing, hiring, training, assisting, or coaching those who can will still be lucrative.

The not so good -
What does the rest of Cowen's America 2033 look like?
Older and poorer. Invest in micro housing and trailer parks in Texas. Maybe it won't be so bad. [...] or maybe it will be.[...]
Cowen correctly points out the huge pitfall in online education. "Online education can thus be extremely egalitarian, but it is egalitarian in a funny way. It can catapult the smart, motivated, but nonelite individuals over the members of the elite communities. It does not, however, push the uninterested student to the head of the pack." The remaining 85% stagnate albeit with access to cheap fun and cheap education. Many of the 85% will live quite well as they benefit from the near free services but others will fall by the wayside.

But maybe it does not have to be this way. Cowen himself points to a potential way out. Education has typically failed to motivate. And even the best online courses are probably even worse than most classroom teachers. "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." There are however a few coaches who have demonstrated the ability to motivate. [...] I never met Coach Fitz but I certainly met mine as a lazy 8th grader on the football field in the form of a 5 foot 4 inch Woody Hayes disciple named John Short. Could this be bottled and taught? The future for your kids and the rest of us American 85 percenters may depend on motivators like these.

What the end of average will look like to colleges.

"It will be a brutal age of good schools and also mediocre schools undercutting each other in terms of price and thus tuition revenue. If it costs $200 to serve a class to another student, how long will it be before an educational institution undercuts a competitor charging $2,000 for those credits?"

This is a highly original book. I strongly recommend this especially for a high school senior or college freshmen.

I heard the interview of the author on Terri Gross and decided to read the book. I think many of the points were very valid however a few pitfalls by the author made the last half of the book pretty painful to read. First, he uses way too many chess analogies. Over 10% of the book talks about chess which becomes very tedious. There is also very little talk about how education at the college level needs to change. The future of certification and degree marketing to youth with an astronomical student loan debt is barely addressed. I suspect the author is highly biased toward the ivory tower of formal education and didn't dedicate any major discussion of how success in the future will depend on life long learning outside of the traditional educational institutions. This book will quickly show up in the discount bin, so listen to the interview and save your money.

Although the book has an interesting premise -- that the future will reward those who can interact with technology with earnings that far outpace those who can't -- its a one-trick pony. He paints a bleak picture for the 80-90% of the world's population who continue to fall behind the productivity curve bought on by ever-continuing advances in technology.

While Cowen makes a good case for how humans will use the exponentially increasing computing power in the future to produce improved results -- think weather forecasting, auto manufacturing, chess playing, etc -- he never goes very deeply into how this dynamic will play out in the various countries and markets around the world. Nor does he spend much time thinking about how we might include more people in the "winning" category and "power America beyond" this coming worker stagnation. Maybe he is setting the stage for his next book where he gives this more thought. If so, Average Is Over could have been shortened by 100 pages and still conveyed the same message.

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