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

by Thomas L. Friedman

accelerated tax incentives and eliminate regulatory barriers to rapidly scale up the deployment of superfast bandwidth—for both wire line and wireless networks. Numerous studies show a direct correlation between the speed and scope of Internet access in a country and economic growth.

upgrade our ports, airports, and grids and to create jobs.

ban the manufacture and sale of all semiautomatic and other military-style guns and have the government offer to buy back any rifle or pistol in circulation. It won’t solve the problem, but Australia proved that such programs can help reduce gun

We need a tax system that specifically incentivizes the things we want—investment, work, and hiring—and shrinks the things we don’t want: carbon emissions, corporate tax avoidance, overregulation, climate change, and gun violence. We simply can’t afford them any longer.

January 1, 2013, the U.S. Senate resolved its fiscal-cliff negotiations by agreeing on a $600 billion tax hike—$60 billion a year for ten years. Just a few days earlier, on December 28, 2012, the Senate approved a $60.4 billion aid package to help New York and New Jersey recover from the devastation caused by one storm—Superstorm Sandy—that raked across the eastern United States in October 2012. In other words, we spent on one storm all the new additional tax revenue for that year.

labeling on all sugary drinks, candies, and high-sugar-content fast foods, warning that excess consumption can cause diabetes and obesity—just as labels on cig...

in the last 35 years, global diabetes among men has more than doubled—from 4.3% in 1980 to 9% in 2014—after adjusting for the effect of aging. Meanwhile diabetes among women has risen from 5% in 1980 to 7.9% in 2014.” It added that “the largest cost to individual countries [was] in China ($170 billion), the US ($105 billion), and India ($73 billion).” Mother Nature would not be for telling anyone what to eat, but she would be for making sure they are fully aware of the consequences of excess.

limit national political campaign spending and the length of the national campaign to a period of a few months.

end gerrymandering, by following California’s move to a nonpartisan commission of retired jurists who draw up congressional districts in the most balanced way possible. If you have nonpartisan boundaries, you are much less likely to have safe Republican or Democratic seats, so elections will be more competitive around the center and candidates will have to appeal to independent voters. In safe districts a Republican, most of the time, can lose only to another, more conservative Republican and a Democrat can lose only to a more liberal Democrat.

elevate and expand the Peace Corps to be an equal branch of service with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps, including with its own service academy.

condition all U.S. foreign aid to developing countries on their making progress on gender equality, and on access for every woman who wants it to family planning technology. As a global community, and environment, we simply can’t afford the population explosions that, in combination with climate change, desertification, and civil strife, are making more and more swaths of the world uninhabitable. The welfare burden on the World of Order and the stress on the planet generally will become increasingly disruptive and unmanageable. Family planning and poverty alleviation and climate mitigation are policies that have to coevolve and not be treated as separate.

biological systems that thrive all have one thing in common, notes Amory Lovins: “They are all highly adaptive—and all the rest is detail.”

In a healthy community people are not only looking out for each other; they are getting out of Facebook and into each other’s faces.

“Interdependency is a moral reality,” explains Seidman. “It is a reality in which we rise and fall together; we affect each other profoundly from great distances in ways we never could before. In such a world, there is only one strategy to survive and thrive: it is to forge healthy, deep, and enduring interdependencies—in our relationships, in our communities, between businesses, between countries—so that we rise, and not fall, together. It’s not complicated, but it’s hard.”

“Then, Rabbi, tell us: How do we know that night has ended and day has begun?” The rabbi stared back into the faces of his students, and with a voice suddenly gentle and imploring, he responded: “When you look into the face of the person who is beside you, and you can see that person is your brother or your sister, then finally the night has ended and the day has begun.”

“Collaboration moves at the speed of trust,”

had other remarkable teachers who remain cherished friends to this day—particularly Miriam Kagol, my English teacher, and Marjorie Bingham, who taught me AP American history and indulged my fascination with Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories and my early obsessions with Israel, the Six-Day War, and the Middle East. I was intrigued to hear them both reminisce about the high quality of the public schools. “I had money to buy whatever books I wanted,” Bingham remarked. “There were NSF [National Science Foundation] grants, there were national conferences you could go to. You never felt isolated in your classroom. [You felt as though] you were on a bigger stage and could talk to people from Illinois or California. [Today] a teacher will spend four or five hundred dollars of their own money on supplies. That just didn’t occur” back then. St. Louis Park “teachers were encouraged by the administration to be creative.”

Kagol and I have been friends ever since. Reflecting on the role of the community as a value setter, Kagol mused: I remember I had one kid who plagiarized a poem for The Mandela [the high school literary arts magazine] and we published it, not knowing it was plagiarized, and found out after, and when we took him to the principal he told that student: “You have disrespected what this teacher stood for.” I knew the principal would back me up no matter what the situation, and I had no worry that a parent would call up and ask for my head if I chastised their child. There was a community respect for the system and for the teacher—even if the parent thought the teacher was wrong.

they understood that government is there to compromise, make decisions, and support the private sector, and the private sector is there to create jobs and contribute to the public good,

In the mid-1970s, it noted, Minnesota’s leading businesses formed the Five Percent Club—in which Minneapolis–St. Paul corporations agreed to set aside 5 percent of their pretax income for philanthropy. Believe it or not—and it is a little hard to believe, given the modern emphasis on maximizing profits and pleasing Wall Street—the club still exists. Now known as the Keystone Club, it has 214 members, and 134 of them donate at the 5 percent level …

And in my case it was hard not to carry with me for a lifetime a sense of optimism that human agency can fix anything—if people are able and ready to act collectively. And it was hard to leave there and not carry with me for a lifetime an appreciation of how much a healthy community can both anchor and propel people.

“It’s not Kumbaya inside the legislature, but the culture is that it’s not acceptable to just be a blocker and ignore the reality.”

Do I even have to mention what a contrast that is to Washington, D.C., where there is zero trust between the parties, or between them and the private sector, so the great engine of American growth—our public-private partnerships to promote research, infrastructure, immigration, education, and rules that incentivize risk-taking but prevent recklessness—has pretty much ground to a halt?

The larger point is that in Washington, D.C.—no matter what the issue or the party—you are guilty today until proven innocent. In a healthy community, you are innocent until proven guilty, and even then people will cut you slack if they think you made a good-faith effort. “Sometimes the wings come off the plane,” said Mayor Jacobs, “but people will accept that—if they think you’re trying to get to outer space.

If you want to change the way people view government, “you have to change the way government views people. If you view them as a necessary evil, they won’t trust you—that is how they will view you.”

Most people, particularly those who immigrate in search of a better life, just want to live in a peaceful place and raise their children to be productive citizens. We should help them do that in every way possible.”

At the national and local levels, we need a leadership that can promote inclusion and adaptation—a leadership that starts every day asking, “What world am I living in?