I just read my third Tom Friedman book. The man is an outstanding columnist and citizen of the world. When you see him on CNN or whatever, stop and drink in that knowledge and wisdom. Thank You For Being Late covers many topics in the fast changing world but the basic idea is that the time spent thinking while waiting for someone can be a golden opportunity to gather thoughts. Relating to politics and policy, we should stop a think about who we are and what we need rather than the dog and pony show of which candidate can do this or that. If I got the book from the library then ordered online, you know it is good stuff—below are my notes and highlights.
Thank You For Being Late
Thomas L. Friedman
p. 6 And so now that we have made waiting obsolete, their attitude is “Who needs patience anymore.” But the ancients believed that there was wisdom in patience and that wisdom comes from patience.. Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.p. 155 That said, people have bodies and souls, and when you feed one and not the other you always get in trouble. When people feel their identities and sense of home are being threatened, they will set aside economic interests and choose walls over Webs, and closed over open, in a second – not everyone will make that choice, but many will.
p. 205 Today’s American dream is now more of a journey than a fixed destination – and one that increasingly feels like walking up a down escalator. You can do it. We all did it as kids – but you have to walk faster than the escalator, meaning that you need to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning, and play by the new rules while also reinventing some of them. Then you can be in the middle class.
p. 205 For more than a decade after the Internet emerged in the mid-1990s, there was much lamenting about the “digital divide.” That really mattered because it limited what you could learn, how and where you could do business, and with whom you could collaborate. Within the next decade that digital divide will largely disappear. And when that happens only one divide will matter, says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, and that is “the motivational divide.” The future will belong to those who have the self-motivation to take advantage of all the free and cheap tools and flows coming out of the supernova.
p. 206 The example I use is a billboard that used to be up on a highway here in Silicon Valley which asked a simple question: “How does it feel to know that there are at least one million people around the world who can do your job?” It would have been an absurd question to ask twenty or thirty years ago because it didn’t matter – I’m here and they are somewhere else. Now it is increasingly a central question, and one might add, “How does it feel tknow there are at least one million robots who can do your job.”
p. 207 So where do we begin? The short answer, says Auguste, is that in the age of accelerations we need to rethink three key social contracts – those between workers and employers, students and educational institutions, and citizens and governments. That is the only way to create an environment in which every person is able to realize their full talent potential and human capital becomes a universal, inalienable asset.
p. 248 China may be America’s rival, but in today’s interdependent world, its collapse would be far more threatening to America than its rise. Probably the worst thing a rising China might do is bully all its neighbors into toeing its line, take over more islands in the South China Sea, or demand more economic concessions from foreign investors. But a falling China could melt down the U.S. stock market and trigger a global recession, if not worse.
p. 277 In each successive generation, a smaller and smaller number of people is enabled to affect the lives of larger and larger numbers of people through the application of technology. The effects may be intentional or unintentional, and they may be beneficial or they may not.
p. 288 I went to Amman Jordan. I talked to them about the contrast between the $13.5 million in U.S. scholarships and the $1.3 billion in military aid. “If America wants to spend money on training soldiers, she added, well “teachers are also soldiers, so why don’t you spend the money training us? We’re the ones training the soldiers you’re spending the $1.3 billion on.”
p. 290 None of it is going to happen overnight, but we need to work with the forces of order that do still exist in the World of Disorder to start building a different trajectory, beginning with all the basics: basic education, basic infrastructure – roads, ports, electricity, telcom, mobile banking – basic agriculture, and basic governance. The goal, said Gates, is to get these frail stats to a level of stability where enough women and girls are getting educated and empowered for population growth to stabilize, where farmers can feed their families, and where you “start to get a reverse brain drain” as young people feel that they have a chance to connect to and contribute and benefit from today’s global flows by staying at home and not emigrating.
p. 293 Barbut has her own idea for an affordable modern-day Marshall Plan for Africa. “To restore a hectare of degrade land, it cost between one hundred and three hundred dollars,” she said, while a day in the refugee camp for one refugee in Italy cost the host government forty-two dollars.” Her proposal: in the thirteen countries from Mali to Djibouti, fund a “Green Corps” of five thousand people- one per village in each country – give then basic training and seedlings for planting trees that can retain water and soil, and pay them each two hundred dollars a month to take care of their plantings. This is an idea that actually originated with African leaders. It’s called “the Great Green Wall” : a ribbon of land restoration projects stretching across the entire southern edge of the Sahara, to hold the desert back – and help anchor people in the communities where they actually want to live.
p. 298 Megginson: Yes, change is the basic law of nature. But, the changes wrought by the passage of time affect individuals and institutions in different ways. According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. Applying this theoretical concept to us as individuals, we can state that the civilization that is able to survive is the one that is able to adapt to the changing physical, social, political, moral, and spiritual environment in which if finds itself.
p. 310 And to start with I would focus on five of these killer apps that have immediate application to governing today: 1. The ability of to adapt when confronted by strangers with superior economic and military might without being hobbled by humiliation. 2. The ability to embrace diversity. 3. The ability to assume ownership over the future and one’s own problems. 4. The ability to get the balance right between the federal and the local – that is, to understand that a healthy society, like a healthy tropical forest, is a network of healthy ecosystems on top of the ecosystems, each thriving on its own but nourished by the whole; maybe most import, 5. The ability to approach politics and problem-solving in the age of accelerations with a mind-set that is entrepreneurial, hybrid, and heterodox and nondogmatic – mixing and coevolving any ideas or ideologies that will create resilience and propulsion, no matter whose “side” they come from.
p. 310 The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously observed: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determine the success of society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
p. 321 Al Qaeda and ISIS, using high-density fossil fuels, are trying to wipe out all that diversity and create a monoculture that is enormously susceptible to conspiracy theories and diseased ideas. This has left that region barren, weak and unhealthy for all its inhabitants. I would argue the same thing happened to the Republic Party in America. The G.O.P. used to be an incredibly rich polyculture. And for decades the party itself was a pluralistic amalgam of northern liberal Republicans and southern and western conservatives. But in recent years, the TEA Party and other hyper conservative forces, also funded in large part by fossil fuel companies and oil billionaires, have tried to wipe out the Republican Party’s once rich polyculture and turn it into a monoculture that’s enormously susceptible to diseased ideas.
p. 327 Very often I meet mayors who have a much better grasp of the world, and the requirements for competitiveness, than their congressmen.
p. 349 One practical way to begin is to anchor as many people in healthy communities. Beyond laws and guardrails, police and courts, there is no better source of restraint than a strong community. Communities also do double duty. They create a sense of belonging that generates the trust that has to underlie the Golden Rule, and also the invisible restraints on those who would still think of crossing redlines.
p. 361 ….says Grinstein, that “the basic architecture of a resilient and prosperous twenty-first-century society must be a network of healthy communities. National governments are just too cumbersome, distant, and, in too many cases, gridlocked to have the agility needed in the age of accelerations, he argues, and the single-family unit is too weak to stand alone in the face of the hurricane-force winds of change, especially since many families, particularly single-parent ones, are living so close to the edge- without savings, pensions, or homeownership. A model twenty-first century community would be one that is focused on supporting the employability, productivity, inclusion and quality of life of its members at a time when more and more families need a local hand up to keep pace with the accelerating pace of change.
p. 408 Edmund Burke: When he hailed the community, or what he called the ‘little platoon,” as the key building block and generator of trust for a healthy society.
p. 436 Sondra Samuels: What makes me most hopeful is the ownership that African Americans in this community are taking – (their realization) that nobody is coming to save us. Partners are critical but we have to save ourselves – we have to change our community ourselves. I see families creating achievement plans and they are working their plans and they are showing up differently at their child’s school and they are enrolling in parenting education classes like crazy.
p. 438 The Minnesota way is that everyone should maintain their customs, but there are certain bedrock values – regarding how you treat women, the rule of law, other faiths, public institutions, and community spaces- that are nonnegotiable.
p. 440 But regardless of our cultural heritage, all of us have participate in American society. To do that successfully requires speaking English, gaining an education, and making a contribution. Most people, particularly those who immigrate in search of a better life, just want to live in a peaceful place and raise their children to be productive citizens. We should help them do that in every way possible.
p. 443 It’s amazing what happens when people gather around a dining room table, a build trust by focusing exclusively on what they can do to push the community forward. “Trust doesn’t just materialize,” Welsh concluded. “It takes work. It requires a whole bunch of people to keep at it – to keep showing up, and that doesn’t just happen magically.”
p. 448 …what I have found instead was that with every passing year American politics more and more resemble the Middle East that I had left. Democrats and Republicans were treating each other just as Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Persians, Israelis and Palestinians did – self-segregating, assuming the worst of each other, and lately, shockingly, never wanting one of their kids to marry one of “them.” This is awful and has become totally debilitating at exactly the wrong time. We have so much work to do. We need accelerated innovation in so many realms, and it can only happen with sustained collaboration and trust.
p. 452 …the most important personal, political, and philosophical lesson I took from the journey that is this book is that the more the world demands that we branch out, the more we each need to be anchored in a topsoil of trust that is the foundation of all healthy communities. We must be enriched by that topsoil, and we must enrich it in turn.
Project Logic Ga 