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

by Tyler Cowen

That means humans with strong math and analytic skills, humans who are comfortable working with computers because they understand their operation, and humans who intuitively grasp how computers can be used for marketing and for other non-techie tasks.

It sounds a little silly, but making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the future. At some point it is hard to sell more physical stuff to high earners, yet there is usually just a bit more room to make them feel better. Better about the world. Better about themselves. Better about what they have achieved.

But getting attention will continue to be a critical function in the new world of work and is likely to require ever-greater effort and sophistication.

If you have an unusual ability to spot, recruit, and direct those who work well with computers, even if you don’t work well with computers yourself, the contemporary world will make you rich.

The growing value of conscientiousness in the workplace helps women do better than men at work and in colleges and universities.

Will we likely try to make our surrounding environments more like a chessboard and less like complicated, always-under-construction, multiple intersections? Imagine a world that is “stupider” than the world we live in today because it is designed more for machines, which require very literal readings of what is going on around them. It is a very real possibility.

It seems we care more about drama than about perfection.

We don’t want to treat human beings and computer programs the same way, even when the latter become extremely skilled, or perhaps especially when the latter become extremely skilled. We wish genius machines to serve our practical ends, but we don’t want to turn over to them the spheres of life that structure our narratives, drive our emotions, define what our lives are all about, and help us separate right from wrong. We’re determined to “keep them in their place.”

When companies move production offshore, they pull away not only low-wage service jobs but also many related jobs, such as high-skilled managers, tech repair people, and others. But hiring immigrants for low-wage jobs helps keep many kinds of support services in the United States. In fact, when immigration is rising as a share of employment in an economic sector, offshoring tends to be falling, and vice versa. That means immigrants are very often competing more with offshored workers than with other laborers in America.

Some of what is going on in today’s global economy is a reorienting of economic activity toward where most of the people are, and obviously, most people live in Asia. There have been a lot of people in Asia for a long time, but these days they have a much higher per capita income. One way to compete, to remain a global center of economic activity, is to build up a larger and stronger cluster of population and production. If we want North America to be a global leader, we should bring in more people to the United States. We don’t want the United States, and the liberal values it (sometimes) projects, to become a second-rate force on a global scale, neither economically nor politically.

This kind of machine-based learning is driven by a hunger for knowledge, not by a desire to show off your talent or to “signal” as we economists say. If you’re not a good player, the fact that you studied with a top teacher doesn’t mean a thing. No one is impressed and no one will want you to play for their team. There is nothing comparable to the glow resulting from a Harvard degree: Announcing “I studied with Rybka” would bring gales of laughter, since anyone can do that. Indeed, the best chess teacher takes all comers and has every incentive to do so. The company selling Rybka tries to make its product replicable and universal, whereas Harvard tries to make its product as exclusive as possible. Now, which model do you think will spread and gain influence in the long run?

It will become increasingly apparent how much of current education is driven by human weakness, namely the inability of most students to simply sit down and try to learn something on their own. It’s a common claim that you can’t replace professors with Nobel-quality YouTube lectures because the professor, and perhaps also the classroom setting, is required to motivate most of the students. Fair enough, but let’s take this seriously. The professor is then a motivator first and foremost. Let’s hire good motivators. Let’s teach our professors how to motivate. Let’s judge them on that basis. Let’s treat professors more like athletics coaches, personal therapists, and preachers, because that is what they will evolve to be.

Of course, educational institutions aren’t ready to admit how much they share with churches. These temples of secularism don’t want to admit they are about simple tasks such as motivating the slugs or acculturating people into the work habits and sociological expectations of the so-called educated class. As it currently stands, we are losing track of a college education’s real comparative advantage. This was an acceptable bargain when the wages of educators and administrators were low, and government budgets had more slack, but it’s becoming increasingly expensive.

We like to pretend our instructors teach as well as chess computers, but too often they don’t come close to that ideal. They are something far less noble, something that we are afraid to call by its real name, something quite ordinary: They are a mix of exemplars and nags and missionaries, packaged with a marketing model that stresses their nobility and a financial model that pays them pretty well and surrounds them with administrators. It’s no wonder that this very human enterprise doesn’t always work so well.

It is actually quite easy to imagine that we might put the world’s very best education online, for free, or for the costs of a few apps, and that most of the world—the undereducated most of all—wouldn’t really care very much.

High-skilled performers, including business executives, will have some kind of coach. There will be too much value at stake to let high performers operate without a steady stream of external advice, even if that advice has to be applied rather subtly. Top doctors will have a coach, just as today’s top tennis players (and some of the mediocre ones) all have coaches. Today the coach of a CEO is very often the spouse, the personal assistant, or even a subordinate, or sometimes a member of the board of directors. Coaching is already remarkably important in our economy, and the high productivity of top earners will cause it to become essential.

Grigory Perelman did better. He was awarded a Millennium Prize of $1 million in March 2010 for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture, which states that “every simply connected, closed, 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere.” If you think that summary is hard to understand, just try to figure out the proof. The original submitted proof had arrived many years earlier, in a series of papers from 2002 and 2003, but again, at first no one was sure if he had succeeded. (By the way, Perelman eventually turned down the prize, saying he didn’t want money or fame.)

Eventually, dare I say it, science will also look more like religion and magic because of its growing inscrutability. The working parts will be hidden, much as an iPhone functions without showing you its principles of operation. You will be able to see the bureaucracy if you look at the scientific community, and every day you will be exposed to the magic as a customer or on your job.

The measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility.