2. About the author
Book review
Personal view
3. • Thomas Loren Friedman (born July 20, 1953) is an American political
commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who is a
weekly columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively on
foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and
environmentalissues.
• He has been criticized for his staunch advocacy of the Iraq War and
unregulated trade and his early support of Saudi Royal Prince Mohammed
bin Salman.
4. • Author begins by taking us into his own way of looking at the world–how he
writes a column. After a quick tutorial, he proceeds to write what could only
be called a giant column about the twenty-first century. His thesis: to
understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the
planet’s three largest forces – Moore’s law (technology), the Market
(globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)–
are accelerating all at once. These accelerations are transforming five key
realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.
5. • Why is this happening? As author shows, the exponential increase in computing
power defined by Moore’s law has a lot to do with it. The year 2007 was a major
inflection point: the release of the iPhone, together with advances in silicon chips,
software, storage, sensors, and networking, created a new technology platform.
Friedman calls this platform “the supernova”–for it is an extraordinary release of
energy that is reshaping everything from how we hail ataxi to the fate of nations to
our most intimate relationships. It is creating vast new opportunities for individuals
and small groups to savethe world–or to destroy it.
6. • Thank You for Being Late is a work of contemporary history that serves as a
field manual for how to write and think about this era of accelerations. It’s
also an argument for “being late”–for pausing to appreciate this amazing
historical epoch we’re passing through and to reflect on its possibilities and
dangers. Toamplify this point, Friedman revisits his Minnesota hometown in
his moving concluding chapters; there, he explores how communities can
create a “topsoil of trust” to anchor their increasingly diverse and digital
populations.
7. • With his trademark vitality, wit, and optimism, Friedman shows that we can overcome the
multiple stresses of an age of accelerations–if we slow down, if we dare to be late and use
the time to reimagine work, politics, and community. Thank You for Being Late is Friedman’s
most ambitious book–andanessential guide to the present andthe future.
• Now that the author has written his most ambitious book — part personal odyssey, part
common-sense manifesto. “Thank You for Being Late” has two overt aims. First, 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 O.K. In general the explanation is more
convincing than the reassurance. But as a guide for perplexed Westerners, this book is very
hard to beat.
8. • 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 Friedman digs cleverly into each one. For instance, on
technology he argues convincingly that 2007, which saw the arrival of the iPhone,
Android and Kindle, was the year when software began, in the words of Netscape’s
founder, “eating the world”; he introduces us to vital obscure bits, like GitHub and
Hadoop; he points out that if Moore’s law (that the power of microchips would
double about every two years) had applied to the capabilities of cars, not computer
chips, then the modern descendant of the 1971 Volkswagen Beetle would travel at
300,000miles per hour, cost 4 cents and useone tank of gasoline in alifetime.
9. • The chapters on climate change and the market are stuffed with similar nuggets.
But 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 9 percent in a “flash crash.” And everything,
Friedman warns, will keep getting faster. There are already at least 10 billion things
connected to the internet —but that is still less than 1percent of the possible total
asever more cars,gadgets and bodies join “the internet of things.”
10. • 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. Inevitably he sometimes gets the balance wrong, either allowing his
informants to ramble on, or skating over a thorny detail: For instance, having
admitted that productivity numbers have not leapt forward in the same way that
technology has, he asks us, in effect, to trust him, they will. 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.
11. • “When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause
button on human being, they start.”
-ThomasL. Freidman
• Due to novel CORONA virus pandemic issues we are facing lockdown. This is the time
where all of us have time to talk to ourselves and know the purpose of our being. While in
running race of life, money and success, we often forget to see at ourselves, to look at
morals and purposes we have or had, this could be the best time to pause and start over, to
experience the worthiness of the place you belong to, to acknowledge your loved ones who
caredabout you andto reconnectthe world you left behind but never want to.
