Average is Over

Themes

Cowen forecasts that modern economies are delaminating into two groups: a small minority of highly educated and capable of working collaboratively with automated systems will become a wealthy aristocracy; the vast majority will earn little or nothing, surviving on low-priced goods created by the first group, living in shantytowns working with highly automated production systems. About 60% of the jobs lost during the 2008 recession were in mid-wage occupations. US Median male wages declined by about 28% between 1969 and 2009, with no obvious disaster to blame.

Cowen claims that this future is foreshadowed by the recent evolution of chess from a game played by brilliant iconoclasts into freestyle chess, a team sport that relies on the creative use of advanced chess-playing software.

Cowen celebrates the arrival of functional online education, mostly because it allows a much broader audience to keep up with rapid change at a price that everyone can afford and leverages the same sort of self-teaching that drives video game players to ever-greater achievements.

He sees the future role of educators as motivators rather than professors, closer to a gym membership, with (online) personal trainers. He cites Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as a place full of young threshold earners, members of the second group.

In his final chapter, "A New Social Contract?," Cowen writes, "We will move from a society based on the pretense that everyone is given an okay standard of living to a society in which people are expected to fend for themselves much more than they do now."

He briefly discusses some ethical issues around intelligent technology. Robocars will be more efficient, observe speed limits and be much safer. However, how they will address an ethical dilemma (e.g., save the baby or the two adults) is unknown.

Cowen predicts that detailed measurements will transform services such as medical care. Patients will employ performance metrics on their doctors, while the doctors will know more about how well patients follow diet and medicine programs.

Interviews and discussions

Technology writer and critic Andrew Keen interviewed Cowen for his Keen On series for TechCrunch in September 2013.

Cowen appeared on a Financial Times podcast. Diane Coyle also participated to discuss her own book and the authors talked about each other's books as well. The host was Cardiff Garcia.

Cowen appeared on National Public Radio in September 2013 to discuss the book.

In late September 2013, Cowen appeared on the EconTalk podcast with host Russ Roberts.

Cowen discussed the themes of the book in a video interview by Nia-Malika Henderson for the On Background series of the Washington Post.

99u published some advice from Cowen for its readers that was based on the insights in the book.

Reviews

The book was reviewed favorably by Philip Delves Broughton in the Wall Street Journal. Broughton noted that Cowen had not investigated high finance in his book and could have done so, but was otherwise favorably impressed by Cowen's themes.

Economist Diane Coyle's review stated, "the more specific message of the book is rather sober."

Matthew Yglesias gave the book a mixed but largely positive review on his Slate blog, Moneybox. On the one hand, he writes, he expects that the book "will set the intellectual agenda in much the way that its predecessor [The Great Stagnation] did not," but on the other says that its "somewhat cryptic tone" requires "explication." He writes that Average Is Over apparently contradicts Cowen's previous book, The Great Stagnation – whereas that book argued (to quote Yglesias) "that the median household in rich countries had suffered stagnant living standards thanks to a slowdown in technological progress," Average Is Over argues that "the median household in rich countries will suffer stagnant living standards thanks to a speedup in technological progress." Yglesias proposes that the contradiction is resolved because "read in conjunction it's clear that in neither period was the stagnation actually caused by the pace of technological change ... scratch the surface and you'll see that Cowen actually thinks there's a policy reform agenda that, if implemented in a timely fashion, would channel much more of the gains of future automation and computerization to the median household." Yglesias then says that the policy reforms favored by Cowen constitute "in general a very solid forward-thinking 21st century egalitarian agenda." But he explains why Cowen "doubts the political system will deliver any of these solutions," and also notes that Cowen argues that "these somewhat bleak trends he forecasts aren't really all that bad if you look at them in the right light." He concludes by explaining why he disagrees with Cowen on both of these points.

Robert Heritt reviewed the book for The Daily Beast, calling it a "lively and worryingly prophetic read." Cowen linked to and excerpted from the review on his own blog.

Will Baude reviewed the book for the Volokh Conspiracy, a conservative/libertarian-leaning law blog, writing, "I still can't figure out if it is utopian or dystopian." His review concentrated on the parts of the book that described the future of lawyers.

The book also received a (gated) review from Brenda Jubin on Seeking Alpha. Jubin wrote: "The future Cowen paints is pretty bleak for the majority of Americans." She concluded by writing: "This is not a future I want to see. We can only hope that, as often happens, trends are disrupted."

The Economist gave the book a mixed review, observing that Cowen's predictions about the use of technology for surveillance, rising unemployment and demands for lower taxes were in line with current trends, but arguing that Cowen was too sanguine about the potential for inter-generational conflict or the appeal of demagogues in a democracy where the majority will become poorer.

Other reviewers of the book included Peter Lawler for the Libery Law Site (a sister site to EconLib), Teresa Hartnett for Publishers Weekly (a negative review), Michael Barone for the Washington Examiner, Richard Reeves for TruthDig, Arnold Kling on his own blog, John Daly on BlogTalkRadio, and others.

Other mentions

In late September 2013, economist Art Carden listed the book as one he was reading. He worried that Luddites would misread the book and, as a preventive measure, highlighted a passage arguing that immigration to the United States would be vital to its future economic vitality.

On his blog Overcoming Bias, economist and futurist Robin Hanson commented on the response to Cowen's predictions in the book that inequality would increase, and noted that the pundits who were responding to it seemed to ignore Cowen's claim that there wasn't much that could be done about it, and instead aimed to offer solutions or fixes. Hanson wrote: "They seemed to hold fast to a simple moral principle: when a future change is framed as a problem which we might hope our political system to solve, then the only acceptable reason to talk about the consequences of failing to solve that problem is to scare folks into trying harder to solve it. If you instead assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, and analyze the consequences of that in more detail, not to scare people but to work out how to live in that scenario, you are seen as expressing disloyalty to the system and hostility toward those who will suffer from that failure."