Consider this passage from Friedman's column:
"In a world where, as I've argued, average is over -- the skills required for any good job keep rising -- a lot of people who might not be able to acquire those skills can still earn a good living now by building their own branded reputations, whether it is to rent their kids' rooms, their cars or their power tools."
This paragraph reads like a Zen koan pieced together from cast-away fragments of motivational sales speeches. We're left to infer the meaning of its more obscure phrases from their context, the same way World War II codebreakers cracked particularly difficult passages in enemy telexes. So let's try to tease out its meaning, phrase by phrase:
"In a world where, as I've argued, average is over ..." (Emphasis from the original.)
"Average is over"? Averaging is a mathematical function, inextricably woven into the fabric of reality as we understand it. How can it be over? It's like saying that subtraction is over, or means and medians are null and void. (Watch yourself, standard deviation. Thomas Friedman has his eye on you.)
What's he really saying here? The "as I've argued" offers one clue to motivation, if not meaning: Anything self-referential from this author -- and that's a lot -- is a signal that he's floating another potential "The World Is Flat" book title.
But what's he saying? Our context-driven codebreaking takes us to the next phrase:
"... the skills required for any good job keep rising ..."
Ah, I see. "Average is over" is connected to job skills. Friedman apparently means that you can't get a good job anymore if your skill level is only average.
Why didn't he just say so?
20 Million Startups
What are the implications of a world in which you must be above average to get "any good job"? When Garrison Keillor described Lake Woebegon as a place where "all the children are above average," it was a joke. But Friedman's not joking. He's describing a world in which ordinary people are excluded from decent employment -- and he's doing it without expressing regret or demanding change.
To be fair, Friedman is an advocate for education -- in his own way. But his education arguments, like his economic ones, focus on the online, the gimmicky, and the jargon-laden. Friedman's world doesn't seem to include manufacturing jobs, or construction jobs, or good government jobs. He envisions a workforce made up almost exclusively of "lateral thinkers" and "integration" engineers. Students should be trained to "invent" their jobs, says Friedman, who claims that self-invented work will be the best source of future employment.
Based on the number of people currently seeking full-time employment in the US alone, 15 or 20 million people need to "invent" their jobs pretty quickly. That's a lot of Internet start-ups, along with a whole boatload of "lateral thinking."
Friedman's unrealistic view of the labor force, shared by many tech entrepreneurs, is one in which the middle class is as passe' as a Commodore 64. How can formerly middle-class Americans survive in the world they envision?
Average White Brand
According to Thomas Friedman, tens of millions of un- and under-employed Americans can "earn a good living online by building their own branded reputations." (That's right: He went there. He said "branded reputation.") Using websites like Airbnb, Friedman suggests, they can rent out "their kids' rooms, their cars or their power tools."
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