Underpaid Genius

Friedman’s ‘Average Is Over’: Blaming The Victim Again

Friedman drives me crazy. His newest nonsense is Average Is Over:

Thomas Friedman, Average Is Over via NYTimes.com

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.

Ok, try the thought experiment: everyone who is now average ‘finds their unique value contribution that makes them stand out’. But if they all do, they can’t stand out. So what he is saying is crazy.

Or else it is a trick. Friedman may be implicly accepting the unstated: that most people won’t find their inner uniqueness, and will become obsoleted by cheap Chinese labor or automation. And the moral of the story is one of personal failure: the unemployed have failed because they lack the inability to rise to the challenge posed by the new world order.

But, as usual, Freidman does not touch on the fact that the economic system that we live in is not preordained: it is a system of laws and international policies that have benefited those that own and run the machinery tended by cheap Chinese labor and robots. The rentiers and corporations are pounding the world into dust to make trillions for themselves. And apologists like Friedman tell us it is our incapacity to work hard, our inability to learn the skills or summon the pluck to train ourselves in the necessary skills needed for the new world order, they tell us it is us: we are to blame for being cast aside. We are too average in a world where average is over.

We have a system in which the government extracts less from the rich than ever before, when fiscal austerity is leading to cutbacks in primary and secondary education, where college is increasingly unaffordable, and where the millions with college degrees cannot find work. A world where corporations are sitting on trillions in profits but are unwilling to hire. Nonetheless, he tells us it is all our fault.

Friedman never stops blaming the victim. He’s just a sycophant, hoping to sell more books to the oligarchs.

Source: The New York Times