Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
Written by Tyler Cowen
Narrated by Andrew Garman
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen (Ph.D.) holds the Holbert C. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University. He is the author of Discover Your Inner Economist (2007), Create Your Own Economy (2009), the New York Times bestseller The Great Stagnation (2011), An Economist Get Lunch (2012), Average is Over (2013), and a number of academic books. He writes the most read economics blog worldwide, marginalrevolution.com. He has written regularly for The New York Times and contributes to a wide number of newspapers and periodicals.
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Reviews for Average Is Over
56 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Too bleak, with no suggested way out of the scenarios he presents?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very Interesting topic and Cowen makes many strong points. But, the same points could have been made in a book half as long.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation is supposed to be a longer sort of sequel to his Great Stagnation (my review).
Tyler Cowen forsees a future with a continually widening gap between the top 1% and the bottom 10%, but without the guillatines and other doom predicted by modern Progressives. He believes our society will grow more conservative as the elderly make an increasing percentage of the population and will accept the new norm and what comes with it. Competition with China will settle the country to accept other status quos much as competition with the USSR did in the U.S., Cowen predicts.
The "winners" in the coming economy are those who can effectively use machines-- not necessarily programmers but those with enough skill to use the data that machines can give us, while making the machines do what we want.
"Overall, these job market trends are bringing higher pay for bosses, more focus on morale in the workplace, greater demands for conscientious and obedient workers, greater inequality at the top, big gains for the cognitive elite, a lot of freelancing in the services sector, and some tough scrambles for workers without a lot of skills. Those are essential characteristics of the coming American labor markets."
The "losers" will be those who do not adapt, they will continue to see decreases in their real wages but some will get along fine, enjoying what would once have been considered marvellous luxuries-- cheap high-speed internet and cellphone service, education, food, and clothing. Others will not fare so well, and will create problems for society much as one sees today.
As higher taxes are an inevitability to pay for the greater debts the government is projected to run due to entitlements like Medicare, people will continue to move to places like Texas where they will settle for "C-level" local government but enjoy cheaper housing, helping their paychecks go further.
Cowen's chapters on and frequent references to the evolution of technology in chess play are a bit of a digression, these made the book rather boring. Also, is it not obvious that those who can effectively use technology today are the ones who have an easier time finding jobs? Isn't the future he's predicting already here? Perhaps he's just staying it will stay the way it is, more of the same. In some cases, a technology-oriented future needs more people, but they all need to be more highly skilled as well.
"Keeping an unmanned Predator drone in the air for twenty-four hours requires about 168 workers laboring in the background. A larger drone, such as the Global Hawk surveillance drone, needs about 300 people...an F-16 fighter aircraft requires fewer than 100 people for a single mission."
He considers his take different because it doesn't predict much of the gloom-and-doom but more acceptance of the status quo.
"Right now the biggest medium for envy in the United States is probably Facebook, not the yachting marinas or the rather popular television shows about the lifestyles of the rich and famous."
The book does not touch foreign policy much at all. Cowen admits that many of the middle-class, low-technology jobs have gone to China, and argues that allowing more immigrants would help bring those jobs back-- and thus create jobs for more native-born Americans in creating the infrastructure for those companies. That would also help ease the funding burden for programs like Social Security by having a larger number of workers paying in.
The military's huge component in our economy is not properly dealt with, I believe. Cowen sees somewhat of a retreat of the U.S. military from the world stage, but doesn't explain what this will mean for jobs directly or indirectly dependent on the military. That's a weakness of the book.
I did enjoy his critique of behavioral economists, how their own studies fall into the pitfalls of cognitive bias that the subjects they critique generally do.
"(Behavioral economists) are looking for behavioral theories that are too elegant, too simple, or too intuitive, such as the abstract strictures of mathematical decision theory."
Whether you like this book or not depends on whether you like the prophecies. Like any book with somewhat broad predictions, it is hard to judge. His references and beliefs are well documented, 25% of the book are references-- it's well-known that Cowen may be the most well-read person on the planet.
I give this book 3 stars out of 5. Not the best Cowen book. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Tyler Cowen is a writer, blogger, and an economist. It is in the latter role that he is foremost although his influential blog, Marginal Revolution, is renowned and I would certainly recommend it. He has written five books, not counting textbooks, and his latest is Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. While the title tells you about the main theme of the book I found that, beyond the economics of our current snail-like recovery from the depths of the recession, this book is a cornucopia of ideas about a diverse number of aspects of our life both now and in the future.There are three Parts to the book which focus on first, the growing divide between those who earn more, much more than average and those who are below-average earners; second, the importance of machines and, in particular, games in our future; and third, the changing nature of work.The opening chapters establish some of the important themes for the book by describing the current environment of stagnation and making the claim, that will be supported by examples throughout the book, that "new technologies already emerging will lead us out of" the current stagnant economy. In fact the economy is not stagnant for everyone, for those who have already adapted and are involved in the "right" sectors of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), in particular the growth in computers, the internet, and most importantly intelligent machines. Cowen also introduces the metaphor of Chess that returns again and again throughout the book. You do not need to be an expert in the game to understand the power of intelligent machines that can 'crunch' the data necessary to defeat grandmasters every, every time they are challenged."As intelligent analysis machines become more powerful and more commonplace, the most obvious and direct beneficiaries will be the humans who are adept at working with computers and with related devices for communication and information processing. If a laborer can augment the value of a major tech improvement by even a small bit, she will likely earn well. (p 21)He supports this with examples from areas like the growth of cell phones in both quantity and quality, the changes brought about by super-computers that play chess and for several years have been significantly better than the best grandmasters, and the changing nature of work with examples from companies at the forefront of the new age like Google and Amazon. The tests given prospective employees at Google are described and they seem like something out of a trial for Mensa. Are they easy?"There's a whole book titled Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? by William Poundstone. A few minutes reading it will make the answer clear to most readers, even if the word smart is not exactly the right word (Picasso was a genius but I doubt he could have landed a job at Google's Mountain View headquarters)." (p 35)The days when you could just show up, role up your sleeves and start selling or doing any job are dwindling.The changes discussed, documented, and commented upon in the first part of the book carry over into the latter two parts. There are and will be more changes to the nature of how you obtain a job --note the impact of social networking websites like Facebook or LinkedIn-- and your workplace whether it is an office, a factory or a sales counter. That the days of the lone scientist are over seems even more true as the complexity of machines as tools grows exponentially. Education faces changes as well due to the impact of the world of new machines. Cowen discusses the rise of MOOCS (massive online courses), information blogs, and the ubiquity of avenues for online education. But there is more."It is not just formal online education and blogs. Apps. TED lectures on YouTube, Twitter, reading Wikipedia, or just learning how to work and set up your iPad are all manifestations of this new world of competitive education, based on interaction with machine intelligence. These new methods of learning are all based on the principles of time-shifting (watch and listen when you want), user control, direct feedback, the construction of online communities, and the packaging of information into much smaller bits than the traditional lecture or textbook chapter." (p 181)Late in the book Cowen discusses the potential changes for his own profession, the 'dismal science' of Economics. He anticipates that theoretical models will be challenged by more and more data-driven approaches. He says (and as someone with an Economics degree I read with interest) it will go as follows:"(a) much better data, (b) higher standards for empirical tests, and (c) lots of growth in complex theory but not matched by a corresponding growth in impact. Mathematical economics, computational economics, complexity economics, and game theory continue to grow, as we would expect of a diverse and specialized discipline, but they are if anything losing relative ground in terms of influence. Economics is becoming less like Einstein or Euclid, and more like studying the digestive system of a starfish." (p 222)The economics profession is like other social sciences and, like the economy as a whole, will be changing in ways that both take advantage and depend upon ever more powerful and complex computing and communication devices. There is much more in this challenging compendium of facts and ideas that will change our world. The direction of this change will determine where you and I will be and what we will do in the age of intelligent machines. In Average is Over you get one very knowledgeable economist's glimpse into that future.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5provocative read, accessible in terms of not being jargon heavy