Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation is Tyler Cowen’s follow-up book to the hotly debated The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick and Will Feel Better.

Written in the midst of the global financial and fiscal crisis, The Great Stagnation, outlined the causes of the world wide economic slow-down. Average is Over is the users guide to living and prospering in the age of the Great Stagnation.

Unsurprisingly, Cowen who also authored The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy(2010) continues to see technology or machine intelligence as the driving force behind future economic growth and prosperity. He also warns that those nations and individuals who do not innovate and are not motivated to learn the new ways will be left behind.

“I think for a lot of people, upward mobility will be much easier. We’re seeing an enormous amount of global upward mobility that’s quite rapid and quite sudden, and undiscovered individuals have a chance — using the Internet, using computers — to prove themselves very quickly. So I think the mobility story will be a quite complicated one. We’ll have a kind of new meritocracy, but again, it will be a meritocracy, which will be oppressive and perceived as oppressive in some ways due to more rapid measurement and this requirement that the person in some way really prove himself or herself.”

Tyler Cowen on Average is Over
NPR Morning Edition