Average Is Over

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: January 24, 2012

In an essay, entitled “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.”

Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

Yes, new technology has been eating jobs forever, and always will. As they say, if horses could have voted, there never would have been cars. But there’s been an acceleration. As Davidson notes, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.”

And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Last April, Annie Lowrey of Slate wrote about a start-up called “E la Carte” that is out to shrink the need for waiters and waitresses: The company “has produced a kind of souped-up iPad that lets you order and pay right at your table. The brainchild of a bunch of M.I.T. engineers, the nifty invention, known as the Presto, might be found at a restaurant near you soon. … You select what you want to eat and add items to a cart. Depending on the restaurant’s preferences, the console could show you nutritional information, ingredients lists and photographs. You can make special requests, like ‘dressing on the side’ or ‘quintuple bacon.’ When you’re done, the order zings over to the kitchen, and the Presto tells you how long it will take for your items to come out. … Bored with your companions? Play games on the machine. When you’re through with your meal, you pay on the console, splitting the bill item by item if you wish and paying however you want. And you can have your receipt e-mailed to you. … Each console goes for $100 per month. If a restaurant serves meals eight hours a day, seven days a week, it works out to 42 cents per hour per table — making the Presto cheaper than even the very cheapest waiter.”

What the iPad won’t do in an above average way a Chinese worker will. Consider this paragraph from Sunday’s terrific article in The Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China: “Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly-line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the [Chinese] plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. ‘The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,’ the executive said. ‘There’s no American plant that can match that.’ ”

And automation is not just coming to manufacturing, explains Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, a Silicon Valley idea lab that invented the Apple iPhone program known as Siri, the digital personal assistant. “Siri is the beginning of a huge transformation in how we interact with banks, insurance companies, retail stores, health care providers, information retrieval services and product services.”

There will always be change — new jobs, new products, new services. But the one thing we know for sure is that with each advance in globalization and the I.T. revolution, the best jobs will require workers to have more and better education to make themselves above average. Here are the latest unemployment rates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Americans over 25 years old: those with less than a high school degree, 13.8 percent; those with a high school degree and no college, 8.7 percent; those with some college or associate degree, 7.7 percent; and those with bachelor’s degree or higher, 4.1 percent.

In a world where average is officially over, there are many things we need to do to buttress employment, but nothing would be more important than passing some kind of G.I. Bill for the 21st century that ensures that every American has access to post-high school education.

By Theodore Dalrymple

9:06PM GMT 18 Jan 2012

Courage is a virtue and heroism is admirable, but do we have a right to demand them? Which of us cannot look back on his or her own life and remember decisions, or compromises made, or silences kept because of cowardice, even when the penalties for courage were negligible?

If we are cowardly in small things, shall we be brave in large? Have we the right to point the finger until we have been tested ourselves? When we read of the seemingly lamentable conduct of the captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, who left his passengers to their fate, do we say, “There but for the grace of God go I”?

Of course, leadership entails an obligation to be courageous – morally, physically or both. It is the price of leadership; it is why leaders are more highly regarded and rewarded than the rest of us. But even subordinates in certain professions have the duty to be brave, as the rest of us do not. A soldier is expected unquestioningly to put himself in the way of bullets as a civilian is not.

I have witnessed some very fine instances of bravery. Once, as a junior doctor, I was walking through the hospital grounds when I noticed a patient sitting on a bench slashing his wrists with a broken bottle of vodka whose contents he had just drunk. I asked him to come into the hospital where I could sew him up (sobering him up was beyond my powers). He refused and I went to fetch a porter to drag him in by force.

By the time we returned, he had climbed up the fire escape (it was a Victorian building) and clambered over the railings on to a narrow ledge three storeys up, on which he was swaying drunkenly. The porter and I went up the fire escape: the man threatened to jump if we came nearer.

We decided we had to make a grab for him; as we did so, he jumped. We held him suspended by his arms three storeys up. First he shouted, “Let me go, you bastards!” and then, “Help, I’m falling!” – a metaphor for the whole of human life, when you come to think of it.

We were not strong enough to haul him over the ledge or even to hang on to him for long. By the luckiest chance, two policemen arrived at the hospital and, hearing the commotion and grasping the situation, they rushed up the fire escape to our assistance. Without a moment’s hesitation, they climbed on to the ledge themselves and hauled the man to safety. If he had put up the slightest struggle, they would all three have fallen to their deaths.

They brushed away my commendation, and even my thanks; in their own opinion, they had only done their duty, what they were expected, and expected themselves, to do. Of course, if they had done otherwise, a man’s life would have been lost, and four men would have been prey to a lifetime of painful self-examination. The policemen would have wondered whether they should have saved the man; the porter and I would have wondered whether, in grabbing the man, we had acted recklessly and irresponsibly.

I witnessed another instance of great bravery many years later, when times were changed. It was in the prison in which I worked as a doctor. A prisoner set fire to his mattress in his cell, and years of research by the Home Office seemed to have gone into disproving the old saying that there is no smoke without fire, for the mattress produced the thickest, most acrid, black smoke that I have ever encountered, without much in the way of flame. Moreover, the building being very new and expensive, the architect had omitted to consider the question of ventilation that would allow smoke to escape in the event of fire – unlike Victorian architects. The prison was a penal Costa Concordia.

With no thought for his own safety, a prison officer entered the cell and pulled the prisoner to safety. I have no doubt that he saved the man’s life. As I sent the officer to hospital to be treated for possible smoke inhalation, I praised him highly and said I expected he would receive an official commendation.

He smiled pityingly at my naivety and said: “A reprimand more likely.” And so it proved: he had not followed procedure, which was to leave it for the fire brigade. The man would have been dead, of course, but at least the official inquiry afterwards could have been assured that he died by the book, that procedure had been followed.

A world in which a man can be reprimanded for bravely saving another’s life is not propitious for the widespread practice of bravery. Virtues tend to disappear in the dissolving acid of rationality.

What, then, might Captain Schettino say in his defence? Let us, for the sake of argument, leave aside the possibility that the whole disaster was an error of his seamanship, and suppose instead that it was what some people call “one of those things”.

In a world used to the utilitarian zeitgeist, he might say that if he had stayed on board and gone down with his ship, nobody who died would have been spared. We imagine a captain on his deck, as he slips under the waves, but this is quixotic romanticism if in fact no one is saved. A captain’s life is worth as much as anyone else’s; nobody’s interest is served by his needless death.

Can we be sure that if Captain Schettino had kept calm and carried on, fewer people would have died? Can it be wholly his fault if the crew were not properly trained and members of it were not even able to communicate with each other, let alone with all the passengers? He could, of course, have refused his command: but how many of us resign our jobs on a matter of principle? If we were to do so, the unemployment rate would be nearly 100 per cent.

All this is special pleading, ex post facto rationalisation. Before the event, the captain accepted his own authority without difficulty or reservation. He was, however, tried and found wanting, perhaps for reasons partly personal but perhaps partly cultural: not because he was Italian but because he was modern – that is to say, without an unthinking allegiance to a standard of conduct that in some circumstances might be, or might appear, ridiculous or counterproductive but in others is essential to the performance of difficult duty.

Hard cases make bad law and even worse sociology, though they are the stock in trade of philosophy, and there is no wickedness or weakness under the sun that is without precedent. Captain Schettino’s story appears human, all too human: possibly a vainglorious man (but there are worse crimes than vainglory) who panicked at the one crucial moment of his career, and who will now spend the rest of his life in a state of bitter remorse and regret.

Could he have known in advance that he was not up to the mark, that no man was less fitted than he for such an emergency? I hope it is not taken for lack of sympathy for the victims and their relations to say that, on the scale of human monstrosity, the captain does not climb very high. His place on the scale of human weakness is another matter.

As it happens, one of the great books of our literature, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, deals with a similar case. The hero, if that is quite the word for him, is mate on an old rust bucket that is taking 800 Muslim pilgrims to Arabia. The boat sinks and Jim saves his skin, an act of cowardice for which he pays for the rest of his life. Marlow, the narrator of the story, describes his fate in words that resonate today:

“Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness. The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in the legal sense; it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush – from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe.”