That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [29]
We need to get back to basics, and fast. We need to upgrade and invest in our formula the way that every generation that came before us has done. We are entering a new economic turn, one that America did more to generate than any other country. Now we have to make sure that every American citizen and company has the skills and tools to navigate it.
PART II
THE EDUCATION CHALLENGE
FOUR
Up in the Air
In 2009, a movie appeared that vividly reflected the impact of two of America’s four major challenges—globalization and the revolution in information technology. The film was Up in the Air, which starred George Clooney as a “career transition counselor” who flies around the country firing redundant white-collar workers at the behest of their bosses. His life is an endless and lonely montage of airport hotels, frequent-flier lounges, TSA patdowns, and in-flight magazines. Along the way, Clooney meets his female clone, played by Vera Farmiga, another lonely road warrior armed with multiple credit cards, wrinkle-free clothing, and carry-on luggage that fits perfectly above the seat. Their affair reminds us that everybody, even a loner, needs somebody to love.
The real co-star, though, is Clooney’s new protégée, played by Anna Kendrick, a hyper-confident, twenty-three-year-old, freshly minted efficiency expert, who comes up with an even better idea for firing people than Clooney’s fly-by pink-slips shtick: handle all the firings from a central office using computers and the Internet, and eliminate the travel and all that I-feel-your-pain-face-to-face stuff that the Clooney character does so well. As Anthony Lane noted in his review in The New Yorker (December 7, 2009), “The film begins with a sequence of talking heads—the faces and expostulations of the newly sacked, as they respond to the life-draining news. If you’re wondering why they seem so artless and sincere in their dismay, that’s because they are; far from being Hollywood bit players, these are real victims of job loss, found in St. Louis and Detroit.” They stare into the camera, responding to the news that a Clooney-like grim reaper has just delivered, with emotions ranging from “This is what I get for thirty years at this company?” to “Who the fuck are you?”
That’s a very good question. It is the raw version of a very basic question many Americans are asking.
While one of the movie’s themes is that even the professionally lonely don’t really want to be alone, its larger point is that the same forces of technology, automation, and outsourcing that are destroying the jobs of the people that Clooney is firing will get him in the end as well, through Kendrick and her techno solution for the mass delivery of pink slips. So while the romantic theme of this film is that no one wants to be alone, the bigger message is that no one is safe—not even the guy whose job is firing people. The convergence of globalization and technology will eventually touch everyone. These forces are far larger than any individual. They are ferocious, impersonal, and inescapable. They are leaving a whole class of American workers up in the air. It is incumbent on all of us to understand how these two forces are shaping American lives and what we need to do, individually and as a country, to harness them rather than be steamrolled by them.
The Merger
Let’s start with a simple declarative sentence: The merger of globalization and the IT revolution that coincided with the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century is changing everything—every job, every industry, every service, every hierarchical institution. It is creating new markets and new economic and political realities practically overnight.