Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by
Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013
If we look at the increase in the share of income going to the top tenth of a percent from 1979 to 2005, executives, managers, supervisors, and financial professionals captured 70 percent of those gains. Another development is this: The better the world is at measuring value, the more demanding a lot of career paths will become. That is why I say “Welcome to the hyper-meritocracy” with a touch of irony. Firms and employers and monitors will be able to measure economic value with a sometimes oppressive precision. The coming world of hyper-meritocracy I’m sketching is not necessarily a good and just way for an economy to run. It will be more productive, and it is true that economic productivity is correlated with many good or apparently good qualities, including higher earnings, better health (usually), and greater financial responsibility toward one’s family.
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I also recommend to the reader Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s Race Against the Machine, a book that came out while I was doing the research and writing on this one. I have benefited considerably from reading their work and from conversations with them. Contents Also by Tyler Cowen Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph PART I Welcome to the Hyper-Meritocracy 1 Work and Wages in iWorld 2 The Big Earners and the Big Losers 3 Why Are So Many People Out of Work? PART II What Games Are Teaching Us 4 New Work, Old Game 5 Our Freestyle Future 6 Why Intuition Isn’t Helping You Get a Job 7 The New Office: Regular, Stupid, and Frustrating 8 Why the Turing Game Doesn’t Matter Part III The New World of Work 9 The New Geography 10 Relearning Education 11 The End of Average Science 12 A New Social Contract?
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PART II What Games Are Teaching Us 4 New Work, Old Game 5 Our Freestyle Future 6 Why Intuition Isn’t Helping You Get a Job 7 The New Office: Regular, Stupid, and Frustrating 8 Why the Turing Game Doesn’t Matter Part III The New World of Work 9 The New Geography 10 Relearning Education 11 The End of Average Science 12 A New Social Contract? Notes Acknowledgments Index PART I Welcome to the Hyper-Meritocracy 1 Work and Wages in iWorld This book is far from all good news. Being young and having no job remains stubbornly common. Wages for young people fortunate enough to get a job have gone down. Inflation-adjusted wages for young high school graduates were 11 percent higher in 2000 than they were more than a decade later, and inflation-adjusted wages of young college graduates (four years only) have fallen by more than 5 percent.
Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by
Trebor Scholz
and
Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017
Today, facing various prophecies about sharing and the future of work, we need to remind ourselves that there is no unstoppable evolution leading to the uberization of society; more positive alternatives are possible. In Average Is Over, the economist Tyler Cowen foresees a future in which a tiny “hyper meritocracy” would make millions while the rest of us struggle to survive on anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a year. It already works quite well in Mexico, Cowen quips. Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne predict that 47 percent of all jobs are at risk of being automated over the next twenty years. And I have no doubt about the vision of platform owners like Travis Kalanick (Uber), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), or Lukas Biewald (CrowdFlower)—who, in the absence of government regulation and resistance from workers, will simply exploit their undervalued workers.
99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by
Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019
(Their answer is principally through aggressive tax avoidance, playing off multiple tax havens against one another to get an acceptable deal.) Once enough wealthy people have become sovereign individuals, coerced redistribution will have to end. At this point, governments will have no choice but to dismantle the welfare state. Tyler Cowen, Economics Professor at George Mason University, set out his vision of a free market ‘hyper-meritocracy’ in which poor people will be forced to move to low-cost housing and to accept vastly reduced support, pacified by computer games and digital media: The American polity [political system] is unlikely to collapse, but we’ll all look back on the immediate post-war era as a very special time. Our future will bring more wealthy people than ever before, but also more poor people, including people who do not always have access to basic public services… we will allow the real wages of many workers to fall and thus we will allow the creation of a new underclass.
The Internet Is Not the Answer
by
Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015
The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, in his 2013 book, Average Is Over, concurs, arguing that today’s big economic “divide” is between those whose skills “complement the computer” and those whose don’t. Cowan underlines the “stunning truth” that wages for men, over the last forty years, have fallen by 28%.78 He describes the divide in what he calls this new “hyper-meritocracy” as being between “billionaires” like the Battery member Sean Parker and the homeless “beggars” on the streets of San Francisco, and sees an economy in which “10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.”79 Supporting many of Frank and Cook’s theses in their Winner-Take-All Society, Cowen suggests that the network lends itself to a superstar economy of “charismatic” teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other “prodigies” who will have feudal retinues of followers working for them.80 But, Cowen reassures us, there will be lots of jobs for “maids, chauffeurs and gardeners” who can “serve” wealthy entrepreneurs like his fellow chess enthusiast Peter Thiel.
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by
Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021
Give them their own way, he worried, and ‘they will destroy all equality and liberty, with the consent and acclamations of the people themselves [italics in the original]’.32 Adams picked other holes in Jefferson’s arguments too, first agreeing with Jefferson’s general thrust, then raising difficult questions about what they actually meant, and in the process foreshadowing worries that were to dominate the discussion of meritocracy from then on, including those advanced by Michael Young in his classic book in 1958 and extending to today’s broadsides about the evils of hyper-meritocracy. He agreed with Jefferson about the existence of ‘a natural aristocracy among men, the grounds of which are virtue and talents’. Then he agonized about what ‘talents’ meant. ‘Fashion has introduced an indeterminate use of the word “talents”,’ he argued.33 Talents might be good qualities, but they might also be morally neutral ones, like beauty, or even downright reprehensible ones, like craft or cunning.