It really is an optimists guide to scary stuff

Summary: Three increasingly fast movements are unsettling the world. Friedman, without minimizing the danger, gives an optimistic account of how we can survive and thrive.

I am broadly a fan of Thomas Friedman's general worldview. He is a progressive (by the definition of Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind's understanding). He is a globalist (in a non-pejorative sense.) He is fascinated with technology, and while not universally trusting in it, he thinks that technology is the way that many of the problems of our world have been and will be solved. He also thinks that government has a role is cushioning the problems of the global markets and regulating those markets for the benefit average person. He does not easily fit into a left/right dichotomy on issues of economics, social safety net, foreign policy or many other issues.

But it has been a few years since I have read one of his books and I am not a regular reader of the New York Times or his columns. Friedman is a bit of an outsider at this point. He falls into the general charge of technocrat and the problems with that label. He is deeply knowledgeable about world politics and for more immigration and more international cooperation, which again, is unfashionable. And Friedman is generally writing as an optimist with wonder about the world in an age that is more cynical and pessimistic.

Thank You for Being Late is broadly about the increasing (and Friedman uses the term exponential often) growth of three area, computing (especially the movement toward big data), global market forces (and this is broad to include trade, immigration and migration and ideas) and climate change. Friedman is not shy about the fact that the world is scary. We know more about the world know than at any other time and we cannot and should not hide from that knowledge. But we also have limited capacity to absorb and process and change.

The title is from a phrase that Friedman frequently tells people that he interviews. "Thank you for being late". He frequently meets people for early breakfasts to interview them. And because of traffic or bad planning or other reasons, it is not infrequent that his guests are late. He has started to say thank you because it is only in those unplanned free times that he can think and process. The quote from this section (and I listened to this on audiobook, so I believe this is accurate, but transcribed.)

"The ancients believed there is wisdom in patience, and that wisdom comes from patience. Patience wasn't just the absence of speed, it was the space for reflection and thought. We are generating more knowledge than ever before...but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it."
I like Friedman's writing style, but he can tend to overwhelm the reader with examples and stories to make his point. So there is far too many fascinating stories and examples that prove his point to really mention. But starting in about 2007, there has been an exponential growth in the ability of technology to collect and harness data. Part of this is felt in the always connected worker. But it is also felt in the slightly too targeted ads that feel like someone is always watching you, and they are.

The use of big data, and the continued shrinking of tech so that iPhones and small sensors and drones can do things that were not really even imagined just a few years ago has cooperated with increasing global markets to make the world seem very, very fast and not particularly friendly to the average small business or worker. Jobs are being gained on the whole, but many of those that are being lost are being replaced by automation or lower wage replacement workers (either locally or somewhere else.) The markets have not been friendly to the working class and/or lower skilled worker, especially in some particular parts of the economy.

Add to that the real effects to the climate that are being felt around the world and you have the perfect storm. (The US has felt some effects of climate change, but there are many areas where climate change is very real. The description of the refugee migration in Africa as a result of the mix of climate change, war and poverty was eerily similar to Parable of the Sower. Friedman was a middle east correspondent for 20 years and spent some time talking about how climate change influenced, but did not solely cause, the current Syrian war.)

So for the first 2/3 of the book I alternated between wonder and terror. Innovation and technology can be amazing. But the implications of innovation and technology can be terrifying. Globalization can and has driven many people from the lowest part of world poverty, but also is knocking many previously middle class people back into poverty. And climate change is almost solely terrifying.

Friedman suggests that history is driven by contacts with those around them. The innovative adapt and incorporate, and the more brittle resistant cultures resist and reject the other. Part of the implication of this is that they learn less from others and lose the ability to contribute new ideas to the mix that come about because of adaptations and innovations. Friedman does not explicitly draw on Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory. But it is hard not to see the problem with inherently conservative values of loyalty (to the local group and culture) and purity (against innovative and outside views) being a weakness to globalization, technological change and climate change.

Looking within the US, many rural, or to a lessor extent the White working class that is non-rural, are reacting against innovation, globalization and pluralism with both the election of Donald Trump and the rise of Bernie Sanders. Those conservative values are positive according to Haidt's theory (because that loyalty and purity and other conservative values have positive aspects as well as negative.) But according to Friedman's theory of globalization, there is an inherent negative aspect to it. With the exponential growth of computers (requiring continuous education and retraining) and the exponential growth of globalization (requiring cultural pluralism) these conservative principles have a real negative impact on job growth and wealth creation. And many in the US still deny that climate change even exists as a real problem.

Approximately the last 1/3 of the book is Friedman's own reflections on his life, his community and how he has experienced change. Friedman is 63 years old. When he started as a journalist, he was typing with manual typewriters. He described how his job as a foreign journalist changed over the years, continually dealing with new technology and changing expectations for the job. And he has a long section about the suburban Minneapolis community of St Louis Park, where he grew up. That community was one of the few suburban areas open to Jewish residents and in a small period of time generated a remarkable number of world famous people. Friedman posits that it was the forced pluralism and integration of ideas that helped to generate people as widely known as the Coen Brothers, Senator Al Franken, Marc Trestman (NFL) and more.

Friedman walks through that long autobiographical and community section to suggest that if we create good pluralistic environments (not just on acceptance of the other, but a pluralism based on trust and respect of the other), we value strong, continuous education, local innovation in government and industry, we do the hard things, just not the expedient or easy things, we work on including the whole population, not just those that want to be included, etc, then we can come out of this perfect storm as a storm of opportunity and not disaster.

The weakness of the book is that it does not seriously address the problems of the parts of the world that are resistant to change or actually against increasing change. Friedman views resistance to change as not only a weakness, but a rejection of reality. He isn't dismissing the pain of change or the unequalness of who is forced to change. But this is already a long book and I do not think that Friedman has the psychological or sociological chops to really deal with that weakness.

The positive of the book is that it really is an optimists guide to subjects that are actually pretty scary.

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Would be funny had it not been so pretentious

I should have known that “Thank You for Being Late” is not for me, and not just because I’m not an optimist when it comes to our “Age of Accelerations”. The book has an interesting premise in that idea (the need for a “Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations”), and borrows perhaps its strongest metaphor for it from a Brandi Carlile song, The Eye: “You can dance in a hurricane / But only if you’re standing in the eye.” However, the fundamental flaw in the book is not its sheer ambition (“A field guide to the twenty-first century, written by one of its most celebrated observers”, something that could be admired had it been successful) but the ego behind that ambition (apparent in that blurb) which eventually trips it, as is often the case.

The book attempts to achieve a universal appeal from a very personal point of you. But in order to stand a chance of doing that, a writer has to be able to get over his ego enough to make the ideas and experiences relatable to a global audience. And unfortunately, Friedman is so full of himself that he simply cannot do that. For all its talk of humanity and globalism, the book is way too American in its point of view and focus. That paradox is made clear in a quote towards the end of the book:

“I could put my core values on a bumper sticker, but I would need your whole bumper: I am a socially liberal, deeply patriotic, pluralism-loving, community-oriented, fiscally moderate, free-trade-inclined, innovation-obsessed environmentalist capitalist. I believe that America at its best — and we’re not always at our best — can deliver a life of decency, security, opportunity, and freedom for its own people, and can also be a bulwark of stability and a beacon of liberty and justice for people the world over. How did l come to this worldview? As I said, not by reading any particular philosophers.”

Friedman knows that his core values are not only deeply personal but contradictory, too. Hey, whose aren’t, right? The thing is, though, most of us that are aware of that (and have normal size egoes) don’t claim to have written a “field guide to the twenty-first century” nor bill ourselves as “its most celebrated observers”. (If you’re looking for something closer to that, check out instead “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” by Yuval Noah Harari.) And most who do, would not dismiss philosophers so blithely.

However, Friedman is somehow not bothered by the inconsistencies in his thought brought about by the idiosyncrasies of biography. Instead of trying to address them, learn from them and transcend them (something that would have been laudable, perhaps even valuable), he instead tries to force them together into an grotesquely incoherent mishmash of platitudes held together only by that formidable ego. He obtusely tries to throw these incoherencies upon humanity, not caring much how well they may fit, let alone stick. Not only does he borrow metaphors left and right (from folk rock song lyrics and systolic and diastolic blood pressure, to Hollywood movies and studies on NPR about dance coordination), but he then squeezes them beyond their endurance, resulting in a text that would be funny had it not been so pretentious.

Friedman’s focus is even narrower than simply American, it’s Jewish-American. And this so-called deep patriotism and religious tribalism seem to blind him to the hypocrisies of his book, the gaping chasm between the globalist humanism he’s advocating and his narrow tribal allegiances (primarily to the US, secondarily to Israel). Any critique of these allegiances remains at surface level (lip service) at best, while he smears the stereotypes unsparingly, thick and heavy, upon the rivals of this American-Israeli axis: we’re not just talking about Palestinians and Syrians here, but he extends it of course to Iran, Russia and China. (Again, for an infinitely better example on moving beyond one’s accidents of birth to reach for a truly transcendent humanism, see Harari’s “Homo Deus” — an Israeli, for what it’s worth.)

Friedman divides the World not into the politically correct “Developed” and “Developing”, but rather the inanely rebranded Worlds of “Control” and “Kaos” — yes, complete with the obnoxious arcane spelling. (And this is actually not the most obnoxious rebranding in the book: he tries so squirm-inducingly hard to make his inane rebranding of the cloud as “supernova” happen. Dude, it ain’t gonna!). Like many apologists for the “Developed World”, Friedman would like to pretend that it has nothing to do with sowing the chaos in that “other” part of the world:

“Syrians forgot how to be human in Syria. That is true of a lot of people in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, the Congo, Rwanda, Ukraine, and Bosnia as well — way too many of them reached a point where they hated each other more than they loved their own children.”

This smacks of Golda Meir’s abhorrent quote: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

And then he has the temerity to wax poetic about transforming the “other” to a more inclusive “all”. We — the other chaotic Arabs that do not adhere to American-Israeli dictum — have a saying for that: “He killed him and walked in his funeral procession” and “If you have no shame then do whatever you want.” They’re meant as warnings, not challenges. But we live in a shameless world.

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Excellent but with some reservations.

In 1965, following college, I worked on a project converting a large company's systems from punch cards to magnetic tape. In the late 1970s we introduced computer assisted drawing and I was amazed. Today I own a great camera that happens to make telephone calls; the iPhone 7+ with 128 gb memory. In the intervening 52 years I have had the opportunity to observe Moore's Law up-close. Friedman does an outstanding job in presenting the past and likely future changes in technology. That company, long since merged, had in 1970 107,000 employees where its successor organization has less that 40,000 people and not one disappeared job went to China but instead were lost to the relentless march of technology. (Data Entry, clerical functions, mail room functions, secretaries, administrators, production jobs and many more that simply no longer exist)

Likewise his assessment of Climate Change is, if anything, understated. Our collective unwillingness to address this issue is something future generations will hold their ancestors accountable for although one could doubt that there will be a rosy future if climate trends continue on their current slope.

Parts of his third theme are harder for me to accept as presented. Driven by Technology and Climate aberrations an increasing number of societies and governments have either collapsed (Libya, Somalia) on the edge of collapse (Venezuela, Afghanistan) or increasingly repressive (Syria, Iran). Millions of people can not enjoy the benefits of modern civilization and some, aided by technology, have turned to violence and terrorism as seen in contemporary Europe. Population growth shows no indication of abating which further exacerbates the social, political and civil discourse problems.

My issue with a relatively small part of the book is where he drifts back to his Norman Rockwell childhood in Minnesota and to me it seemed a non sequiter to the rest of the book. The book was completed before the U.S. elections but rather that be an objective observer of the domestic trends and anxieties Friedman allowed his antipathy towards our now president-elect spill into his book where he calls him out by name. That is fine for NY Times opinion page but I personally was offended that he took this otherwise outstanding book to criticize just one candidate without addressing some of the flaws of the other candidate or the underlying issues.

On balance, despite my comments above, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the increasingly interconnected world of technology (for good or evil), Climate change and its implications and, finally, how all of this accelerating change is impacting everyone from localities to the greater global community. Time is not our friend as these issues manifest leaving entire swaths of different societies adrift. This book did little to assuage my concerns about the future that will be presented to my four year old grandson.

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Very good content. A little repetitive. Could suggest hearing it on a slightly higher speed

I did enjoy a lot the insights, the story, and the unwinding of the story. I still think it could be made a little bit more compact.

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Inspirationally Hopeful

Being so demoralized, disheartened, and dismayed at the results of our recent election, I needed something to lift me out of the metaphorical mud pit in which I find myself. I was inspired by Charlie Rose's recent interview with Thom. Freidman. Here comes a voice of reason from among the morass of ignorance that so pervades our country and politics today. Freidman' clarity of vision helps explain the inexplicable. He goes a little overboard about the Minnesota Way that cemented the early development of his value structure, but points out that there is cause for hope if only our leaders (and followers) take some of those values to heart. "Thank You For Being Late" should be required reading for our entire population. Proof of such should be mandated of all in leadership position.
It's a new era. The cheese has indeed been moved. Get on board or you'll never again clear the dust from your nostrils!

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Thought provoking

If you like Thomas Friedman's writing style you'll appreciate the book. Some chapters are more interesting than others, and Friedman has a tendency to extrapolate small anecdotes as proof of larger concepts that may not always hold true. But overall it makes you view the world a little different than you did before, and that's where the real value is in his writing.

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An explanation for the era of discontent

Thomas Friedman articulately walks back the current state of affairs and provides a reasonable explanation for the malaise and frustration of the disenfranchised American. We have a lot of healing to do...

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Relevant and appropriate today - a guide to impactful forces.

Liked his breadth and depth of analysis of key impactful forces- Friedman develops some themes he's written about before. His worldview has been modified since 2007 - the year iPhones were invented. His premise - so much has changed since 2007 - a 'new' book is warranted.
Should be of interest to Friedman fans and those who read about large changes impacting society.
Friedman remains hopeful/optimistic - well written.

Carl Gallozzi

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A Very Relevant Book for the Times

If you could sum up Thank You for Being Late in three words, what would they be?

Informative, relevant, and insightful.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Thank You for Being Late?

The novel is full of examples and stories that bring the point home. Some of the more memorable have to do with the technological advances we are dealing with, how chickens can change lives in a big way, and how a political party would behave if it was like mother nature.

Have you listened to any of Oliver Wyman’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I am new to audio books so this was my first time listening to Oliver Wyman. He did a fine job with a very fact heavy book. It was not an earth shattering performance but it was solid and kept me engaged.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

There are several moments that made me chuckle due to the ironic humor the author has. At other times you can't help but wonder "why is this not happening?". If you follow current events this book goes in depth into many of them facing society today.

Any additional comments?

This is a superbly written book. I enjoyed listening to it but I feel like this one would be better read in hard copy. I plan on purchasing it so that I can make notes and highlights. There is so much information to digest that being able to annotate would enhance the experience.

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An Understanding of Our Current World Situation and Some Ideas for Tackling Some if Our Problems

An excellent book, full of ideas that might help our society move in a better direction and an interesting way to try to understand the times we live in. I leaned so much I didn't know about modern technology -- fascinating and hopeful. I also gained an understanding of how countries can't really not participate in our global society at this point, because climate change, over population, unstable governments, and lack of opportunity are causing people to migrate because there is no hope where they live and this is and will effect all parts of the world.

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