PDF Summary:Thank You for Being Late, by Thomas L. Friedman
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These days, the world is moving faster than ever. Every day new scientific discoveries are announced, conflict breaks out somewhere in the world, and nature and the climate behave unexpectedly. If you feel overwhelmed or destabilized by this, you’re not alone—no period in the history of humanity has ever been subject to such quickly changing conditions as today.
In Thank You For Being Late, author, journalist, and columnist Thomas Friedman explains how these conditions arose—the three forces that shape the world, technology, globalization, and climate change, all accelerated at once—and how we can adapt to them.
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3. Deforestation is the loss of forests and trees. Scientists estimate that the boundary is no more than a 25% loss of the planet’s forest cover since preindustrial times and we’re at 38%.
4. Biogeochemical flows refer to the number of nutrients in the environment. Nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen are necessary for life—if plants and animals don’t have enough, they can’t grow—but the presence of too many nutrients chokes them. Nutrients are found in fertilizers and pesticides, and we’re currently overusing these products. Scientists estimate that the boundary is 25% less than we’re currently using.
We’re Toeing the Line
5. Ocean acidification is the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide. When carbon dioxide mixes with water, the reaction produces carbonic acid. This acid dissolves calcium carbonate, which is a key ingredient of the shells of marine organisms. The acid also harms coral reefs and fish.
6. Freshwater use is the amount of water we can take from groundwater sources and rivers. If we take too much water, wetlands and rainforests will dry out.
7. Atmospheric aerosol loading is the tiny pollution particles in the atmosphere—such as the ones that make up smog—that come from burning fossil fuels. Pollution blocks sunlight and makes it more difficult to breathe.
8. Chemical pollution is the release of chemicals such as plastic and nuclear waste into the environment. These compounds would never form naturally and affect the environment in unpredictable ways—they might even eventually change organisms’ DNA.
We’re Safely Within the Threshold
9. The ozone layer is a shield in the atmosphere made of a gas called ozone. This layer protects the planet from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer. In the 1970s, scientists learned that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a human-made chemical, were damaging the ozone layer. In 1989, the world collectively banned the use of CFCs and the ozone layer recovered.
Population growth has a large effect on the nine systems above because the more people who live on the planet, the more resources they need to stay alive and healthy. For example, to grow enough food to feed everyone, we’ll have to use more fertilizer, water, and fossil fuels to power farm machinery, which will further degrade the planet.
The United Nations predicts that in 2050, the earth’s population will be 9.7 billion, which will be unsustainable. To control population, we need to provide easy access to contraception, educate women and give them control over their reproductive choices, and introduce modern gender norms.
Adapting to the Three Forces
Now we understand all three accelerating forces acting on the world—but what do we do about them? There are two options: 1) try to slow things down, or 2) increase humanity’s ability to adapt.
Option 1, putting on the brakes, isn’t going to work. It’s impossible to stop the accelerations and regain static stability. Even if it wasn’t impossible, the accelerations have created some major problems, such as climate change. We need the accelerations, particularly of technology, to come up with solutions.
Option 2, adaptation, is the only way forward. Adaptation involves:
- Striving for dynamic, rather than static, stability. An example of dynamic stability is riding a bike—you can’t balance if you’re not moving, but once you are moving, you only need to make steering corrections, not create new momentum.
- Increasing the pace of innovation in social technologies (laws, organizations like the UN, and so on) with the goal of catching up to the pace of innovation in physical technology (cell phones, microchips, and so on). Even if we only slightly increase our ability to adapt, it will make a difference.
There are five sectors that require innovation in social technologies: 1) the workplace, 2) geopolitics, 3) domestic politics and culture, 4) morality, and 5) society.
Sector #1: The Workforce
The three accelerations have changed the first sector, the workforce, in the following ways:
1. Middle-class jobs now require more education and knowledge, and to be part of the middle class, you have to work harder, participate in professional development, and deal with shifting employment regulations. Additionally, the increasing requirement for bachelor’s degrees or formal accreditation bars a lot of people from middle-class jobs.
2. Most jobs will change and become partly automated or require new skills.
- For example, taking messages used to be done by telephone operators. Now, it’s part of a receptionist’s duties and is partly automated by voicemail.
3. Single jobs are being split into high- and low-skilled jobs. The high-skilled part will require more skill and pay better, and the low-skilled part will be automated or paid minimum wage.
4. There’s more competition for jobs, either with international workers or automation.
5. “Stempathy” jobs—jobs that require both technical (science, technology, engineering, and math) and people (empathy) skills—are the jobs of the future because technology will never be able to replace or automate human empathy.
To adapt to these changes, we need to rethink the workplace by:
1. Establishing lifelong learning programs. Today, at best, your education prepares you for your first job, and you have to keep learning throughout your life because the world and your job will change over time.
- For example, Udacity offers online courses on, among other things, brand-new technology. They’re able to release courses just months after new technologies appear.
2. Building tools to help match people and their skills to jobs. While technology endangers jobs to some extent, it can also be used to improve the workforce.
- For example, Opportunity@Work tests people who have tech skills but no formal credentials. Opportunity@Work then certifies them, connects them with employers, or points them towards more training.
3. Revising social contracts. The relationships among workers, schools, companies, and the government need to change to adapt to the age of accelerations.
- For example, the relationship between bosses and employees needs to change. Bosses need to hire people based on their skills, not their credentials, and employees need to engage with the opportunities that their bosses provide and work hard.
Sector #2: Geopolitics
The three accelerations have changed the second sector, geopolitics, in the following ways:
1. Average nations have become weak. New nations who don’t have the resources to create strong governments or industries used to be able to rely on foreign help, but the US and other superpowers no longer have the resources or motivation to help.
2. Threats are no longer obviously galvanizing (for example, in the way Nazism and its disregard for human rights galvanized the Western world to oppose it) and can’t be solved simply with armies and a conclusive victory on a particular date.
3. The US has to both contain and work with superpowers Russia and China. The world is so interconnected now that the fall of other superpowers might actually be more dangerous for the US than the rise, and allies can quickly become enemies.
- For example, if China collapsed, there could be a global recession.
4. Due to globalization, disorder in any part of the world affects the rest of the world too.
- For example, thousands of young male migrants from various parts of Africa, which is disordered, meet in Agadez, Niger. On Monday evenings, they pile into trucks to travel through Libya (which is war-ravaged) and hopefully on to Europe, a more ordered part of the world, to find jobs. Neither Libya nor Europe wants to let most of the migrants in.
5. Breakers—individuals or groups who want to cause chaos—are more powerful than ever because they have access to information via the supernova. (Friedman contrasts breakers with “makers,” people who use the accelerations to build new things or improve old things.)
- For example, it’s now easy to source inexpensive bomb-making materials online. It only costs $100 to make an IED, a simple bomb.
6. Social media can help people end oppression but fails to help them create new systems.
- For example, in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak resigned after protests that were organized on social media. However, post-protests, the population became polarized because social media was used to spread rumors and hate speech.
To adapt to these changes, we need to rethink geopolitics by:
1. Amplifying. Give people educational opportunities and economic opportunities, both of which allow people to stay in their countries instead of migrating in search of resources or work.
- For example, after the Arab Awakening, the US gave Lebanese students $13.5 million worth of local college scholarships. At college, they learned about tolerance, critical thinking, and social and gender equality, all of which will help bring stability to the region.
2. Deterring. The US maintains enough power to stop countries from acting in ways the US doesn’t want them to.
- For example, the US needs to maintain its nuclear power so that other countries, especially Russia, China, and North Korea, won’t use theirs.
3. Degrading. Discourage breakers from causing chaos and cutting them off from their leaders if they’re part of a group.
- For example, if a Palestinian village doesn’t approve of suicide bombing, members of the community will be less likely to engage in these nonapproved behaviors because they don’t want their community members to shame or hate them.
Sector #3: Domestic Politics and Culture
The three accelerations have changed the third sector, domestic politics and culture, in the following ways:
1. Political impasses. After the massive technological changes in 2007, the 2008 recession hit, and politics stalled because leaders couldn’t explain the situation to citizens and failed to implement policy changes, such as technology regulations, that would have helped people adapt. This left space for populists who promised to hold back changes.
2. Refusal to compromise politically. The two parties became too committed to their identities (and too reliant on their funders) to consider ideas that didn’t fit neatly into their platforms.
- Example #1: The Republicans have always opposed immigration, but in these accelerating times, increasing legal immigration may be a key to adapting to globalization.
- Example #2: The Democrats have always supported regulation, but overregulation is expensive and can depress economic growth and therefore job creation.
To adapt to these changes, we need to rethink domestic politics and culture by:
1. Studying Mother Nature. Mother Nature has enormous buffering capacities and many people, including the author, have looked to it for an example of how to handle accelerating change.
- For example, one of Mother Nature’s buffering capabilities is adaptation. Ants have developed the behavioral adaptation of assigning their populations different jobs—some ants babysit, giving other ants the freedom to look for food across a wider area.
2. Applying Mother Nature’s buffering capacities to domestic politics and culture.
- For example, Mother Nature’s ability to adapt can inform our ability to adapt. When a country, culture, or individual is presented with another party that’s more successful in some way, if the culture chooses to learn from the stranger, they’ll change for the better.
Sector #4: Morality
The three accelerations have changed the fourth sector, morality, in the following ways:
1. Everyone has godlike powers.
- For example, advances in genetics make it possible for humans to create new organisms.
2. More spaces are unregulated by humans.
- For example, the YouTube ads that run before videos are assigned by an algorithm, not by YouTube staff or the companies who buy the ads. As a result, no one actually knows where the ad will be placed unless she happens upon the video the algorithm selected. This algorithm has resulted in Aveeno, Secret, and Bud Light ads playing in advance of jihadi and ISIS videos. The algorithm had no human judgment to inform its selections.
To adapt to these changes, we need to rethink morality by:
1. Increasing ethical education.
- For example, the author suggests teaching everyone the Golden Rule—treat others as you want to be treated. The Golden Rule will be effective no matter how much the age of accelerations changes the world because it’s adaptable and scalable and applies to any situation.
2. Building healthy communities. Community members watch out for each other and encourage and discourage certain behaviors. Character isn’t usually something that’s developed by an individual; it’s a group effort.
- For example, the Paris climate agreement is an example of a global community. The agreement was designed to slow climate change, which affects everyone on the planet, and 175 countries signed.
Sector #5: Society
The author presents his hometown, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, as a model for how society, specifically communities, can adapt to the accelerations. St. Louis has been successful at adapting because it has implemented the following strategies:
- Class and culture mixing as a response to globalization. People of different backgrounds and cultures regularly encounter each other in well-funded public spaces such as schools and near the lakes.
- Good politicians as a response to all three accelerations. St. Louis Park politicians compromise and work together, so they can quickly respond to any change.
- Public-private collaboration as a response to all three accelerations. Businesses feel obliged to provide jobs, fix local problems, and volunteer in the community.
- Community-minded citizens as a response to all three accelerations. The public has high expectations for politicians and business leaders, and they support community efforts even when they don’t personally benefit.
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PDF Summary Part 1: The State of the World Today | Chapter 1: The Age of Accelerations
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By 2016, it was taking only five to seven years for the world to be noticeably different. It takes humans 10-15 years to adapt, so by the time we adapt, whatever it was we adapted to will have already disappeared and been replaced by something newer.
- For example, in the US, the patent system was developed in the late 1700s. It could take four to five years to get a patent, and after it was issued, the patent-holder had 20 years of monopoly on the idea before she had to share it. Now, however, since a new technology can be out of date in four years, patents are far less relevant.
As you can see from the timeline above, the world changes at an accelerating, exponential pace, which means the pace increases with time. To understand an exponential pace, imagine that a car is driving down a road at 30 mph, but also imagine that it doubles its speed every 10 minutes. After the first ten minutes, it will have covered 5 miles. In the second ten minutes, it will speed up to 60 mph and cover 10 miles. In the third 10 minutes, it will speed up to 120 mph and cover 20 miles. After half an hour, the car has gone 35 miles.
To imagine this exponential change in terms of...
PDF Summary Part 2: Three Forces Shaping the World | Chapters 2-3: Moore's Law
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- It became possible to halve the cost while maintaining the same number of transistors.
This phenomenon became known as Moore’s law, which states that computational processing power will double every two years with only small increases in price.
While this law was created to address microchips specifically, it can be more broadly applied to technology in general to state that technological capabilities grow at an exponential rate. Today, technology is in a place where each doubling is so large, the changes are massive. For example, instead of increasing the space on a floppy disk from 256MB to 512MB, we have self-driving cars.
When it comes to microchips, though, Moore’s law will eventually hit a wall because wires and transistors can only get so small. However, there’s still a long way to go until we hit that wall—currently, microchips are the size of fingernails and can hold a billion 14-nanometer transistors, and people already have a pretty good idea for how to manage seven and five nanometers. While microchips aren’t close to their limit yet, the rate of change is slowing—the last two doublings each took two and a half years instead of two years.
Moore’s...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: Cloud Computing
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- Collective reach. Humans now have the ability to affect global systems such as climate and ecosystems.
An example of the increasing power of machines is the design of jet engine parts. Pre-supernova, when GE designed a new jet-engine part, it was a two-year process. They had to design the part, build the tools that could build the part, build a prototype using the new tools, build the actual part, and then test it. Today, it takes a week. GE designs the part on a computer, sends it to a 3-D printer, and then tests it multiple times a day.
How Did We Get Here?
The dot-com boom in the 1990s and 2000 paved the way for the supernova. During the dot-com boom, people and companies overinvested in internet technology, which resulted in the set up of wires all over the world and a decrease in the cost of connectivity. The internet became easy, fast, free, and universal.
The supernova emerged in 2007, and it was designed to make things less complicated. Complexity became like the internet—easy, fast, free, and additionally, invisible. For example, consider Amazon’s “one-click” checkout. From a customer perspective, you only have to click one button to make...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 5: Globalization
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Types of Globalization
Globalization is the flow of knowledge and information, and there are several different types of globalization, each named for what type of knowledge or information is flowing around the world.
The Flow of Technical Knowledge
The first type of globalization is the flow of technical knowledge. The supernova makes it possible to share technological advances all over the world.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing was an early stage of globalization. US and European companies took advantage of the fact that the world was more connected and hired relatively cheap international engineers to solve their problems. For example, many Indian engineers worked on solving Y2K—the worry that computers would stop working at the beginning of the year 2000.
Once people in non-US or European countries were connected to the flows, they could start using them to solve their own countries’ problems. For example, Aloke Bajpai initially worked in the US before returning to India to start Ixigo.com. Ixigo is a travel search program that helps Indians find cheap travel options. Bajpai used open-source software and the supernova to build Ixigo, and it will run on the...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Climate Change
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(Shortform note: For more information on how humans have changed the earth, read our summary of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.)
Planetary Boundaries
In 2008, a group of earth scientists came up with the idea of planetary boundaries. These boundaries are the limit of how much we can change the earth before the changes become permanent. Permanent change is bad news—modern society is based on the environment we live in and modern infrastructure may no longer work in a changed world.
The baseline for all of the boundaries is the conditions of the planet in preindustrial times. There are nine boundaries, some of which we’re within, some of which we’ve exceeded:
We’re Safely Within the Boundaries
1. The ozone layer is a shield in the atmosphere made of a gas called ozone. This layer protects the planet from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer. In the 1970s, scientists learned that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a human-made chemical, were damaging the ozone layer. In 1989, the world collectively banned the use of CFCs and the ozone layer recovered.
- The boundary: no more than a...
PDF Summary Part 3: Adapting to the Accelerations | Chapters 7-8: Adapting the Workforce
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By the ‘90s, you could reach middle-class if you just worked hard and followed all the rules—well-paying jobs only required average skills. If you worked 40 hours a week you could buy a house, afford to have children, go on vacation, and retire. This was because, after World War II, there were lots of manufacturing jobs, there was little outsourcing or international competition for jobs, and people switched jobs less frequently, so companies put in the resources to train them. Acceleration was slower, so your education was relevant for longer, and technology wasn’t powerful enough to start taking over jobs.
Additionally, back then, not everyone had internet access—there were probably hundreds of thousands of people in the world who could do your job, but because they didn’t have a way to access your job, you didn’t have to compete with them.
Current State of the Workforce
The three accelerations have changed the first sector, the workforce, in the following ways:
Change #1: Middle-class jobs now require more education and knowledge, and the increasing requirement for bachelor’s degrees bars a lot of people from middle-class jobs. (A degree isn’t...
PDF Summary Chapter 9: Adapting Geopolitics
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During this period of time, US foreign policy was easy—the goal was simply to not let Russia take over. While the US and the Soviet Union were technically at war, both had reasonable leaders who were in communication with each other and kept each other in check. Both had enough nuclear power to destroy each other, so neither wanted to start a war because it would result in mutually assured destruction.
Post-Cold War
In between the Cold War and the early 2000s, Russia lost its superpower status and more nations gained independence, such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and America became the single superpower. The major geopolitical conflict was between the US and the rest of the world. As there were no wars going on, foreign policy was mainly the US involving itself with the governance of other countries.
After the failure of the US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq and after the 2008 recession, the US lost power and confidence and pulled out of the Middle East. This resulted in two things: The rise of ISIS and the migration of refugees from ISIS states. The migration caused fear of immigration in Europe.
Current State of Geopolitics
**Today,...
PDF Summary Chapter 10: Adapting Domestic Politics and Culture
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Adapting
In these accelerating times, we need to rethink domestic politics and culture by: 1) studying Mother Nature, which is one of the most adaptable and resilient systems on the planet, and 2) applying nature’s adaptations to domestic politics and culture.
Learning From Mother Nature
Mother Nature has enormous buffering capacities and many people, including the author, have looked to it for an example of how to handle accelerating change. To maintain dynamic stability, Mother Nature uses the following mechanisms:
Mechanism #1: Adaptability. Evolution is fueled by adaptation—the organisms that have biological advantages, or that can figure out a behavioral advantage, find enough resources to survive long enough to reproduce. The organisms that don’t adapt, or don’t adapt well enough to compete with other organisms, die.
- Example of a genetic adaptation: The Namib desert beetle lives in an environment that sees only 1.3cm of rain a year. To get enough water to survive, the beetle collects condensation from the air on its shell, which is covered in bumps that attract water.
- Example of a behavioral adaptation: Ant colonies assign their populations...
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PDF Summary Chapter 11: Adapting Morality
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Example #2: App developers have come up with “ghost apps” that allow users to hide photos and documents on their phones. The apps look like a nondescript default app, often a calculator, until you type in the correct code. In 2015, over 100 high school students in Colorado used one of these apps to share nude photos of themselves. The app allowed teenagers to escape their parents’ governance.
Technology doesn’t have morals, values, or principles, and there are some choices that technology shouldn’t be responsible for. Some work needs to be done by people.
Does God Still Exist?
Today, views on God have to take into account the three accelerations, particularly technology. Depending on which view you subscribe to, there’s a different answer to whether or not God exists in cyberspace:
- If you believe God actively punishes evil, then he isn’t in cyberspace, because cyberspace is full of evil—gambling, pop and rap music with filthy lyrics, and terrorist recruitment—and it hasn’t been struck down yet.
- If you believe that good actions attract God, then God can be present in cyberspace if we act in a moral way and invite him in.
Adapting
In these...
PDF Summary Chapters 12-13: Adapting Society
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- The Minnesota State Fair attracted people from all classes and backgrounds.
Additionally, the community was supported by:
- A strong economy. In the 1960s, the middle class was still a place people could comfortably stay in their entire lives.
- Good politicians. Politicians worked together and compromised to come to decisions that benefited the community.
- For example, Hubert H. Humphrey, who later became vice president, got his start in St. Louis Park—he was mayor and tried to eradicate anti-Semitism.
- Public-private collaboration. Businesses regularly contributed to the community and were involved with local politics.
- For example, many businesses were members of the Five Percent Club, which means they donated 5% of their income to philanthropy such as building theaters and other public spaces.
- Community-minded citizens.
- For example, neighbors helped each other through harsh Minnesota winters because it was the only way to survive.
St. Louis Park wasn’t perfect—there was plenty of racism and sexism—but it did some things right.
Current State of Community in Minnesota
When the author returned to St. Louis Park...