Thank You for Being Late

Thomas Friedman's Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations is his latest book. He continues to examine his theme of interconnectedness and competition and its impact on the world. I was first introduced to Friedman's work when my children were in primary school. Our school superintendent talked about The World is Flat and preparing our children for a changing world in which we do not know the shape of the landscape. Since that time iPhones, iPads and tablets have certainly changed the way we communicate. Immigration has radically changed the faces of our communities- some are frightened by the influx of people from less well off regions of the world, while others see it as the way America became great. The Middle East continues to be a threat to the status quo, but its reach has been magnified. The indisputable fact is that the world is a different place than when my son started school a decade and a half ago.

Friedman identifies three major accelerators to change in our world: Moore's Law, the market and Mother Nature. Moore's Law relates to technology: every two years technology doubles its productivity. The 8K computer of my freshman year of high school was replaced with a 16K machine my senior year. (Schools are not on the cutting edge of technology.) Bandwidth, processors, chips become twice as fast and memory twice as large approximately every two years. The market is what people think of when they think of The World is Flat- the globalization and interconnectedness of the business community. People compete and collaborate across the globe. In the Middle Ages people were bound by their immediate community. In the Age of Exploration they were given the opportunity to escape their communities. In the Industrial Age we saw the movement of goods begin to spread across international borders. In the Information Age we no longer have to go- we send the information electronically. Mother Nature is climate change. No one can argue that we have had several major hurricanes this year- far more than is typical. Nor can they argue the increase in volatility in weather patterns. Global temperatures are warming, the ice caps are melting, and the world is entering its next period of change.

Friedman argues that these three factors combine in ways that mean our world no longer has the expectations it once did. People need to be educated to flex with the rapidly changing world around them. They need to become capable of adapting to information and technology at ever increasing speeds. They need to be able to learn new skills. They need to move forward or else they will be left behind. Trump would argue that to make America great again we need to stem the accelerators. Friedman would argue that you can't and to deny them is to be left behind. He quotes Sondra Samuels say that we need to recognize "the importance of a two generation approach" (p. 434) to build healthy communities in our inner cities. If we remain focused on what can I do today to improve x, we will always fall short of the goal. We need a long range view. The Chicago preschool experiment demonstrated that high quality preschool increased on time graduation rates, employment rates and incomes while decreasing grade retention, incarceration and teenage pregnancy. If you just examine impact within a year or two you miss the richness of the outcomes. We need to take a long range approach, perhaps two generations, to improve the quality of our neighborhoods and the lives of all our citizens. We need to develop an attitude of acceptance of diversity, an importance of education and a standard of excellence.

A world where we live in fear breeds Putin and North Korea. A world where we live in despair and hopelessness breeds Isis. A world where we live in obedience breeds Nazism. We do not want these worlds. We need to spread hope, empowerment and success or we will fall away from greatness. Never has isolationism on our part helped us to compete and remain great. We need to address the concerns of the world's people and raise up everyone. If we focus on keeping "them" down, we hold ourselves back as well.