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Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman
Published in November of 2016
Will you, a card carrying member of our IHE community, put Thomas Friedman’s new book on your reading list?
Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations is completely relevant to the conversations that our community is having. Friedman’s book is something of a response to Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Where Gordon is pessimistic that digital technologies will drive significant future economic growth - at least in comparison to the technological advances of the golden century of 1870 to 1970 - Friedman makes a case for the possibility of a more techno-utopian future.
For Friedman, however, the potential of technology to create and disseminate wealth will depend largely on our political choices. He sees the smart phone and the cloud as just as potentially as revolutionary as the automobile and the airplane, but only if challenges around public investments (schools, infrastructure, etc.) and climate change are responsibly addressed.
The metaphor that Friedman uses in Thank You for Being Late to understand the future is one of a hurricane. He identifies the 3 forces of technological change, globalization (what he calls the market), and climate change as the forces powering this economic/societal hurricane. Friedman thinks that with smarter political choices and a more cohesive community - he uses his hometown of St. Louis Park, Minnesota as the template to follow- that the U.S. can build a strong economic and social future within the eye of storm.
It is good to read a positive book about our future. It is especially good to read such a positive book while trying to make sense - and overcome the depression - of 11/8/16.
Our IHE community, however, has some history with Thomas Friedman. Perhaps more than any other journalist, Friedman bears responsibility for the MOOC bubble. His over-excitement about MOOCs (see Revolution Hits the Universities from 1/26/13) has done much to damage the responsible inclusion of open online courses into our portfolio of learning innovation.
Search for “thomas+friedman” on InsideHigherEd.com and you will get something like over 40 mentions - almost all of them critical. My favorite is Scott McLemee, who wrote that Friedman’s "prose often makes me feel that someone is eating my brain."
Of course, nobody can compare to John Warner - who can be consistently relied upon to take Friedman to task on these pages (screens?). See: An Ad Hominem Attack Against Thomas Friedman, Make Up Your Mind, Thomas Friedman, and Thomas Friedman, Wrong...Even When He's Right.
Okay … so I’m trying to convince all of you (especially John) to look beyond Friedman’s misunderstanding of the meaning and role of MOOCs and his sometimes less-than-informed analysis of the present and future of higher education. My sense is that Friedman shares many - if not all - of the values of those of us who have been critical of his writing. At one point in Thank You for Being Late, Friedman shares his core values:
"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."
That sounds pretty close to how I see myself. You? What would be different on your bumper sticker?
Thank You for Being Late goes a good job, I think, of making sense of many of the forces that will determine the economic and social success of the U.S. in the the decades to come. I like a dose of techno optimism mixed with a discussion of social, economic, and environmental policy.
Friedman might not get everything right, but he is curious about lots of different things.
We should find some way to get him to spend more time understanding what is going on in higher education.
What are you reading?
