How to survive in the new New Economy
The Feb. 2005 issue of Wired Magazine includes an article by Daniel H. Pink entitled Revenge of the Right Brain.
Pink offers some very interesting observations and something of a prediction:
Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and emotion.
Pink, who's in his mid-40's, tells how his parents encouraged him to pursue a practical, productive professional career. He did. And he's still doing it. But then...
...a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind.
Pink offers some pretty convincing evidence, too.
First, Pink offers a "how the brain works for dummies" (like me):
Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our times.
Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.
No self-respecting realist would accept this on face value. Pink came to play:
To convince you, I'll explain the reasons for this shift, using the mechanistic language of cause and effect.
The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance.
For IT workers, Pink's thesis is scary: by 2010 - just five years from now - India will rank as the largest English-speaking country on the planet. And it's not just IT workers either:
Visit India's office parks and you'll see chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans for US hospitals.
Almost all "left-brain" endeavors are under the gun:
...these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only certain kinds of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis is migrating across the oceans.
Fortunately, there's a solution: "Now that foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right-brain work better," as Pink explains.
Pink is light on specifics, and my guess is dKos participants are generally better equipped than "average" techies (with empathy skills and a sense of the spiritual) to deal with an emerging right brain world. But how many of our comrades hunger for more meaning in their lives?
To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.
As an aside, "high concept" and "high touch" are very 1980's-era MBA-school buzz words. If you want to pursue this further, try Pink's book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, © Daniel H. Pink, to be published in March by Riverhead Books. The Wiredarticle was adapted from it.