Friedman says it's going to be okay

The book is a master class in explaining. It canters along at a pace that is quick enough to permit learning without getting bogged down

THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE

An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

Thomas L Friedman

Penguin Allen Lane

486 pages; Rs 799

From Donald Trump to Brexit to Marine Le Pen, one thing that unites the unhappy West is a profound sense of mystification. Across Europe and North America, people have an acute feeling that their world is accelerating away from them — but they can’t quite understand why. There is no narrative. Hence the attraction of leaders who “tell it like it is” and identify convenient scapegoats, like immigrants or the European Union. But what most people really crave is an honest explanation. As with patients on a psychiatrist’s couch, the first step is to understand what is going wrong. Then you can decide on the medication.

Into this darkened room steps “Dr Tom Friedman”.

While other journalists dream of being investigative reporters or news breakers, Thomas L Friedman is a self-confessed “explanatory journalist” — whose goal is to be a “translator from English to English”. And he is extremely good at it. A talent for explanation has garnered him a column at The New York Times and a string of best-selling books on huge subjects such as globalisation and climate change. Snooty critics might grumble about his folksy style, but it is hard to think of any other journalist who has explained as many complicated subjects to so many people.

Now he has written his most ambitious book — part personal odyssey, part common-sense manifesto. Thank You for Being Late has two overt aims. First, Mr Friedman wants to explain why the world is the way it is — why so many things seem to be spinning out of control, especially for the Minnesota white middle class he grew up in. And then he wants to reassure us that it is basically going to be okay. In general, the explanation is more convincing than the reassurance. But as a guide for perplexed Westerners, this book is very hard to beat.

Mr Friedman argues that man is actually a fairly adaptable creature. The problem is that our capacity to adapt is being outpaced by a “supernova,” built from three ever faster things: Technology, the market and climate change. That sounds like a predictable list, but Mr Friedman also shows how all three forces interact, complicating and speeding up one another. In Niger, climate change is wrecking crops even as technology is helping more children survive, so a population of 19 million will reach 72 million hungry people by 2050. On trading floors, technology and markets create “spoofing,” so a 36-year-old geek, operating out of his parents’ flat by Heathrow, can make the Dow Jones index fall nine per cent in a “flash crash”. And everything, Mr Friedman warns, will keep getting faster. There are already at least 10 billion things connected to the internet — but that is still less than one per cent of the possible total as ever more cars, gadgets and bodies join “the internet of things”.

Man has sped up his own response times. Governments, companies and individuals are all struggling to keep up. The book’s title comes from an offhand comment to a friend whose tardiness allowed a few welcome minutes of contemplation.

For the most part, Thank You for Being Late is a master class in explaining. It canters along at a pace that is quick enough to permit learning without getting bogged down. And, yes, the folksiness will still irk some critics: The starting point for the book is a chat with a Bethesda parking attendant, with another attendant from Minnesota waiting near the end. But criticising Mr Friedman for humanising and boiling down big topics is like complaining that Mick Jagger used sex to sell songs: It is what he does well. 

Indeed, this reviewer’s complaint is that the explaining is too convincing. Lying on the couch, listening to him in his guise as “Dr Tom Friedman”, you understand, ever more clearly, the reasons the world is spinning so fast. But respite from these accelerations? There is none, there is not going to be and Trumpian attempts to stop it all will do more damage than good.

So you don’t finish this book thinking everything is going to be okay for the unhappy West — that “you can dance in a hurricane”. There is no easy pill to swallow, and most of the ones being proffered by the extremists are poison. But after your session with “Dr Friedman”, you have a much better idea of the forces that are upending your world, how they work together — and what people, companies and governments can do to prosper. You do have a coherent narrative — an honest, cohesive explanation for why the world is the way it is, without miracle cures or scapegoats. And that is why everybody should hope this book does very well indeed.

The author is the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg
 

© 2016 The New York Times News Service