Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

it now takes us ten to fifteen years to understand a new technology and then build out new laws and regulations to safeguard society, how do we regulate when the technology has come and gone in five to seven years? This is a problem.

“In the twenty-first century, knowing all the answers won’t distinguish someone’s intelligence—rather, the ability to ask all the right questions will be the mark of true genius.”

if it’s not happening, it’s because you’re not doing it.

Indeed, Walmart has discovered that the consumer can actually tell a difference in milliseconds—a thousandth of a single second—and when they hit a buy or send or search button they expect a response in ten milliseconds. Walmart research has found that every half second you add to the time it takes for a customer to get a response when purchasing online results in two or more percentage points in lost transactions

person’s voiceprint is actually more accurate than their fingerprint, iris scan, or any other means of identification.

Translation: Never get between a hungry student and a new flow of knowledge in the age of accelerations.

Ben Rattray founded Change.org in 2007 to create a platform where any digital David could take on any Goliath: corporate, governmental, or otherwise.

When people feel their identities and sense of home are being threatened, they will set aside economic interests and choose walls over Webs, and closed over open, in a second—not everyone will make that choice, but many will.

Warning: in the age of accelerations, if a society doesn’t build floors under people, many will reach for a wall—no matter how self-defeating that would be. With so much changing so fast, it’s easier than ever today for people to feel a loss of “home” in the deepest sense. And they will resist. Addressing that anxiety is one of today’s great leadership challenges,

God always forgives. Man often forgives. Nature never forgives. —Saying

“Just a few years ago,… but then something changed…”

“Wow, I’ve never seen that before…”

“Well, usually, but now I don’t know anymore…”

“We haven’t seen something like that since…”

we are the first generation for whom “later” will be the time when all of Mother Nature’s buffers, spare tires, tricks of the trade, and tools for adapting and bouncing back will be exhausted or breached. If we don’t act quickly together to mitigate these trends, we will be the first generation of humans for whom later will be too late. Sylvia Earle, the renowned oceanographer, puts it succinctly: “What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine the future—not just for us, but for all life on Earth.”

We’re entering an age of acceleration. The models underlying society at every level, which are largely based on a linear model of change, are going to have to be redefined. Because of the explosive power of exponential growth, the twenty-first century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress; organizations have to be able to redefine themselves at a faster and faster pace. —Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google

it is as if the ground under everyone’s feet started shifting faster and faster just as the governing systems meant to help people adjust and adapt largely froze—and few political leaders could explain to people what was happening. This policy gap has left way too many citizens in America and around the world feeling unmoored and at sea, prompting an increasing number to seek out candidates from the far left or far right. So many people today seem to be looking for someone to put on the brakes, or take a hammer to the forces of change—or just give them a simple answer to make their anxiety go away. It is time to redouble our efforts to close that anxiety gap with imagination and innovation and not scare tactics and simplistic solutions that will not work. I would not even pretend to know all that is sufficient in this regard. But in this next section of the book I will offer some of the best adaptation ideas I have gleaned that are surely necessary in five key areas—the workplace, geopolitics, politics, ethics, and community building—to help people feel more anchored, resilient, and propelled in this age of accelerations. The last thing we want is for everyone to stick their paddles in the white water to slow down. That is exactly how you destabilize a kayak and a country.

you need to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning, and play by the new rules while also reinventing some of them. Then you can be in the middle class.

Within the next decade that digital divide will largely disappear. And when that happens only one divide will matter, says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, and that is “the motivational divide.” The future will belong to those who have the self-motivation to take advantage of all the free and cheap tools and flows coming out of the supernova.

we need to rethink three key social contracts—those between workers and employers, students and educational institutions, and citizens and governments. That is the only way to create an environment in which every person is able to realize their full talent potential and human capital becomes a universal, inalienable asset.

“AI into IA.” In my rendering, that would be to turn artificial intelligence into intelligent assistance, intelligent assistants, and intelligent algorithms.

partnership between Udacity, AT&T, and Georgia Tech to create an online master’s degree in computer science for $6,600 for the entire course—as compared with the $45,000 it would cost for two years on campus at Georgia Tech.

the “technology of interruption has outpaced the technology of concentration.” Students need to learn the discipline of sustained concentration more than ever and to immerse themselves in practice—without headphones on. No athlete, no scientist, no musician ever got better without focused practice, and there is no program you can download for that. It has to come from within.

Lewis, an African American woman, now age forty, was born to a single mom (who was herself just fifteen years old when she had LaShana) in East St. Louis, Illinois.

social networks make it much easier to go from imposed order to revolution than to go from revolution to some kind of new sustainable, consensual order.

If I were reimagining geopolitics from an American/Western perspective in such a world, I would begin with the most honest statement I can offer: I don’t know what is sufficient to restore order to the World of Disorder—one should be very humble in the face of such a wicked problem—but I am fairly certain of what is necessary. It’s a policy that can be called ADD, because those are its initials: amplify, deter, and degrade.

The U.S. gave Egypt’s military regime $1.3 billion worth of tanks and fighter jets. It also gave Lebanese public school students a $13.5 million merit-based college scholarship program, putting 117 Lebanese kids through local American-style colleges that promote tolerance, gender and social equality, and critical thinking. Having visited both countries at that time, I noted in a column that the $13.5 million in full scholarships bought the Lebanese more capacity and America more friendship and stability than the $1.3 billion in tanks and fighter jets ever would. So how about we stop being stupid? How can sending planes and tanks to a country—Egypt—where half the women and a quarter of the men can’t read possibly end well?

I talked to them about the contrast between the $13.5 million in U.S. scholarships and the $1.3 billion in military aid, and Jumana Jabr, an English teacher in an Amman public school, summed it up better than I ever could: One is “for making people,” she said, “and the other is for killing people.” If America wants to spend money on training soldiers, she added, well, “teachers are also soldiers, so why don’t you spend the money training us? We’re the ones training the soldiers you’re spending the $1.3 billion on.”

there are so many huge defense industry lobbies that promote funding the tools for killing people and so few advocates for funding the schools for building people. That has to change. Education alone is not a cure-all, but drones alone are a cure-nothing. Islands of decency can spread. Drones are one and done.

“To restore a hectare of degraded land, it costs between one hundred and three hundred dollars,” she said, while a day in the refugee camp for one refugee in Italy costs the host government forty-two dollars. “So, please, we are not talking about a huge amount of money,” she noted. Her proposal: in the thirteen countries from Mali to Djibouti, fund a “Green Corps” of five thousand people—one per village in each country—give them basic training and seedlings for planting trees that can retain water and soil, and pay them each two hundred dollars a month to take care of their plantings. This is an idea that actually originated with African leaders. It’s called “the Great Green Wall”: a ribbon of land restoration projects stretching across the entire southern edge of the Sahara, to hold the desert back—and help anchor people in the communities where they actually want to live.

You need to juggle drones and walls where you must; invest in chickens, gardens, and schools where you can; amplify islands of decency wherever you find them; deter competing superpowers—whenever you’re not also enlisting their help; learn to live with the fact that a foreign policy of amplify, deter, and degrade will more often than not require us to side with the least bad over the worst; and finally, appreciate that widening decency is the necessary precursor to electoral democracy—and in many places is more important.

In 2014, when the Ebola virus broke out in West Africa, it was the American military that sent in three thousand troops and $3 billion to wipe it out. There was no Russian or Chinese aid mission that jumped into the breach.

An immigrant friend of mine from Zimbabwe, Lesley Goldwasser, once remarked to me, “You Americans kick this country around like it’s a football. But it’s not a football. It’s a Fabergé egg. You can break it.”

Yes, change is the basic law of nature. But the changes wrought by the passage of time affect individuals and institutions in different ways. According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. Applying this theoretical concept to us as individuals, we can state that the civilization that is able to survive is the one that is able to adapt to the changing physical, social, political, moral, and spiritual environment in which it finds itself.

focus on five of these killer apps that have immediate application to governing today: (1) the ability to adapt when confronted by strangers with superior economic and military might without being hobbled by humiliation; (2) the ability to embrace diversity; (3) the ability to assume ownership over the future and one’s own problems; (4) the ability to get the balance right between the federal and the local—that is, to understand that a healthy society, like a healthy tropical forest, is a network of healthy ecosystems on top of ecosystems, each thriving on its own but nourished by the whole; and, maybe most important, (5) the ability to approach politics and problem-solving in the age of accelerations with a mind-set that is entrepreneurial, hybrid, and heterodox and nondogmatic—mixing and coevolving any ideas or ideologies that will create resilience and propulsion, no matter whose “side” they come from.

“That is selfish thinking,” Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, says in the movie. “It does not serve the nation.” Then, speaking of South Africa’s whites, Mandela adds, “We have to surprise them with compassion, with restraint and generosity.”

The G.O.P. used to be an incredibly rich polyculture. It gave us ideas as diverse as our national parks (under Theodore Roosevelt), the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Air and Clean Water Acts (under Richard Nixon), radical nuclear arms control and the Montreal Protocol to close the ozone hole (under Ronald Reagan), cap-and-trade to curb acid rain (under George H. W. Bush), and market-based health care reform (under Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts). And 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 hyperconservative 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 G.O.P.’s foundation and opened the way for an invasive species such as Donald Trump to make deep inroads into its garden.

promoting a culture of ownership in human societies, which always creates more resilience.

those scoring highest are Asian countries that have “ownership cultures—a high degree of professional autonomy for teachers … where teachers get to participate in shaping standards and curriculum and have ample time for continuous professional development.” They are not disengaged from the tools of their own craft, like a chef whose only job is to reheat someone else’s cooking.

need to reverse the centralization of power that we’ve seen over the past century in favor of decentralization.

federal government is in no position to supplement the fiscal deficiencies of states and cities alike, and it won’t be for at least a generation, until the baby boomers die off; so localities will have to figure out for themselves how to generate the growth and incomes to sustain their own pension obligations.

single-payer universal health care system funded by a progressive value-added consumption tax (except on groceries and other necessities). The level of this tax would be annually adjusted to the cost of health care, so citizens could feel the connection between the cost of health care and the VAT they pay at the store. 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 us, and it would get U.S. companies out of the health care business and

extend and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit, which are essential trampolines to bounce people out of poverty, by topping up wages of low-income workers and thereby providing an incentive to work. (Both are set to expire in 2017.)

pair support for free trade agreements—the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with the United States and eleven Pacific Rim countries and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union—with wage insurance for workers impacted by free trade.

make all postsecondary education at an accredited offline or online university or technical school fully tax deductible. If every person is going to have to be a lifelong learner, we need a tax environment that makes that economically as easy as possible for everyone. Moreover, it will create jobs.

Mother Nature would also use her bully pulpit to urge every university to move to three-year undergraduate degrees from four. If universities in Europe, such as Oxford, or in Israel, such as the Technion, can instill enough learning into young people in three years to merit a BA or BS degree, American ones can do so as well and save their families 25 percent of the cost of a college degree and all that student debt.

roll back the 2005 “reform” of the bankruptcy laws, which has hurt start-ups by making it much costlier for entrepreneurs to declare bankruptcy and start again, especially those who used their credit cards for seed capital. As

On immigration, she would be for a very high wall with a very big gate.

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. We should also double the research funding for all of our national labs and institutes of health to drive basic research. Nothing would spin off more new good jobs and industries than that combination of more basic research and more knowledge workers.