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CIAO DATE: 07/06
Q: What is globalization, in your view?
Pink: Globalization is the broad movement among economies and societies and technology that is knitting the world closer together and affecting capital markets, technology, and the exchange of information.
Q: What is making this happen?
Pink: I think it's a number of things. One of them is certainly the advent of new technology like the Internet, which allows a child in Zambia to find information almost as fast as the head librarian at Cambridge University. It allows people to stay in touch with their native countries more easily; it allows capital to move across the world to the place where it can be used most advantageously. It confers a greater amount of transparency on governments and political institutions than ever before. It erodes trade barriers. When I think of globalization, I think of it being basically about flows: whether the flows of ideas, flows of capital, flows of goods and services, flows of people—all of which have been made easier and have been accelerated because of globalization.
Q: Are we better or worse off as a result?
Pink: We're better off. In my view, globalization is good, not perfect. And we can't let perfect be the enemy of good. Globalization in general has lifted living standards throughout the world. Now there have been obviously some dislocations from that. If you are an American worker and your manufacturing job goes to a country in the developing world where someone is going to get paid one-fifth of what you're earning, then you have been in some fashion harmed by globalization.
At the same time, that manufacturing worker and his or her family benefit from the lower cost of goods and services because of falling trade barriers. And they benefit obviously from all the technology that helps enable globalization. So my view is that globalization is mostly a plus. And the challenge of public policy, the challenge of political leadership nationally and trans-nationally, is to make sure that people get the benefits of globalization, and that for the downside of globalization, governments and political institutions step in to mitigate its negative effects.
Q: Are there statistics showing that globalization lifts all boats?
Pink: It depends on whose standard of living. Certainly U.S. per capita GDP over the last 50 years has tripled. I am certain living standards in much of the rest of the world have also improved. That said, you've still got more than a billion people on this planet living on less than a dollar a day. So it's not like everybody is living in a land of milk and honey by any long shot, but in general globalization has made things better rather than worse, and in general the present is better than the past. In general, I am almost certain, not because I am a woolly-eyed optimist but because I'm a realist, that the future will be better than the present.
Q: In your book A Whole New Mind, you predict that more routine white-collar jobs will flow out of developed nations and into developing ones, and you say that they will be made up for by more creative jobs in America and other developed nations. Yet, this assumes that most people are capable of being highly creative. Suppose most of us are not?
Pink: I disagree with the premise that most people don't have these kinds of abilities. My argument is that economies are automating and off-shoring routine white-collar work—basic accounting, basic financial analysis, even basic legal services—and this is the same sort of pattern that we saw with routine manufacturing work. Today anything that is routine—that is, anything that can be reduced to a script, to a spec sheet, to a set of rules—this kind of work increasingly is going to disappear from the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, because that kind of work can get done more cheaply by computers and by people overseas.
Now, what that means is that in order to survive in the economy, you have to do something that isn't routine. That tends to be work that is artistic, creative, empathic, about the big picture. And I think that the idea that human beings in general and Americans in particular can't be creative, empathic, big-picture-oriented is flatly wrong.
For example, consider the time when America was moving from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing economy, and people said, "Well, everybody can't go to high school, everybody can't learn to read and write. A good education is only reserved for a certain elite population." What I'm talking about here is not that everyone becomes Salvador Dali, but that everybody becomes adept at these sorts of high-concept, high-touch abilities. And I think that is eminently doable.
No one would say, "The masses of men cannot become literate." Not everybody can become Toni Morrison. But nearly everyone can become literate. "The masses of men can't become numerate." Well, I don't agree with that. I don't think that everyone can be Albert Einstein, but they can certainly be numerate. And they can go beyond that.
Q: What happens to people in developed nations when people in developing nations of the world become equally well educated and find their own creativity?
Pink: I think that's an excellent point. Tom Friedman deals with this issue in his writing. There are two different schools of thought. One is that China and India are racing us to the bottom. The other one is that they are racing us to the top. Friedman believes—and I agree—that they are racing us to the top, again not because I'm an optimist, but because that's always been the pattern, that's always been the trajectory. Now that doesn't mean that it is 100 percent certain to be the trajectory again, but that's what I would bet on.
And so I agree that Americans have absolutely no monopoly on these kinds of creative abilities, and what we Americans have to do is shake off our complacency and become a lot better at this stuff because, as Tom Friedman says, these other countries are racing us to the top.
Q: The nature of work is changing in other ways. Computers are becoming more complex and capable. How soon would you expect computers to compete with humans for professional-grade work?
Pink: I think in some ways that they are doing certain kinds of professional work. Look at TurboTax [a software program that helps people prepare their taxes]. We have all this concern about off-shoring and outsourcing. There were 3 million U.S. tax returns done in India last year by Indian tax-preparers, but there were 21 million tax returns done by TurboTax. So in some fashion, software already can do certain elements of professional work, and increasingly it's going to do more and more.
What that means is that the accountants who want to survive can't make a living off of doing the same sort of thing that a piece of $39.95 software can do. They have to do things that are harder to reduce to computer code, which is a more sophisticated type of advising—understanding what peoples' financial needs are and giving higher-level financial advice.
It's the same thing to some extent with stockbrokers and investment as well. Nowadays many Americans do their investing on line. Information is widely available, Internet brokerage transactions are cheap because you can execute them on your own computer, and you no longer need a stockbroker on the phone to perform the routine transactions.
At some point that stockbroker is going to try to become a financial adviser, to understand your situation in a more detailed way and offer you kinds of advice that a computer program can never do.
Q: What about robots? How do you expect them to affect available work?
Pink: If you go to a manufacturing floor today, what you see is not the manufacturing floor of the 1920s or even of the 1950s, where you had a bunch of guys in greasy overalls turning wrenches on an assembly line. What you see are people, often with associate's degrees, who are basically running these robots. The robots have no autonomy or will of their own. They answer to software code. So someone has to write the code, someone has to monitor those robots. So this is increasingly what a lot of manufacturing work is. This calls on obviously a much higher level of skill.
Q: Do most of the world's workers have the intelligence, the IQ, to adapt to all of this?
Pink: Let me disagree with the premise of that question, that IQ is a measure of aptitude. IQ is a measure of one particular kind of reasoning, but that is hardly the only form of reasoning, and the evidence is overwhelming that the correlation between IQ and career success is essentially zero. What IQ correlates to is what profession you enter. Also, IQ as measured by standard tests has gone up over time too—the median IQ has increased. IQ is part of what it is to be smart, but it's only a small aspect of it. Look at the work of Dan Goleman in emotional intelligence; look at the work of Howard Gardner at Harvard and his multiple intelligences. I don't put much stake in IQ as a measure of human ability.
Q: Do you feel human dignity is threatened by some of the by-products of globalization? Some argue that bonds of family, clan, community, hierarchy are loosening—that even the dignity of individual achievement based on the development of individual skills means less because roles shift so frequently in a globalized economy.
Pink: That's an interesting question. If you consider the Western world a harbinger of the future, the family connections here are much more diffuse than in other parts of the world. You have much greater mobility, where people don't live necessarily where their parents live or where their brothers and sisters live. There is an array of different family forms now that call into question the nuclear family. The point about identity coming from a lifetime of skills is interesting. I think there is a change there, because the half-life of every sort of ability today is shrinking and shrinking. You cannot make a living by plying one trade for 40 years because it doesn't work that way. The lifespan of a particular set of skills is literally a couple of years. So there's a premium now obviously on learning and learning how to learn and constantly upgrading.
Now I don't know whether that erodes human dignity. One could argue that it might enhance it. It allows people to constantly do better, to not fall into stagnation, to have more chance to flower. But, obviously, individual stories differ and the question is a valid one.
Q: In A Whole New Mind, you tend to refer to people as "she." Do you feel that globalization highlights the role of women? Do you also mean to imply that the androgynous side of the human spirit has some sort of advantage in the new economy?
Pink: There is lots of evidence that people with more androgynous minds that can reason both in a typically "left-brain," masculine way and a typically "right-brain," feminine way have a comparative advantage in the modern economy. I think that a lot of the abilities that are often dismissed as "feminine" or "soft"—things like empathy, to some extent even creativity itself—are more valuable nowadays, and that might confer a slight advantage on women. But I think that the future does belong to people with androgynous minds, people who have that analytical capability but people who also have that artistic, empathic ability.
Q: Is that really true? Aren't most people comfortable with traditional gender attitudes?
Pink: Well, look at the U.S. military, in many ways a macho profession. You have a lot of women serving in the military, and the tasks that today's soldiers are called on to perform sometimes involve a more sophisticated set of skills. They have to understand local culture; there are peacekeeping missions—keeping the peace is quite different from going directly into combat. In my view, all men have some capability to think androgynously, and those who aren't willing to develop it might be in trouble.
Q: One of the changes somehow linked to globalization is the widespread use of cell phones, the Internet, even computer games. Are these phenomena, in their playful form, really linked to a globalized economy?
Pink: It's hard to say. But even video games, like any entertainment form, can become a lingua franca that can cross cultures. Even the constant connectedness of cell phones may be related to globalization, though as a somewhat distant cousin.
Q: In your book, you say that globalization seems to have led to an increased search for spirituality in the United States. Why is this?
Pink: There's a huge amount of evidence that above a certain relatively modest level, more money doesn't create all that much more satisfaction and happiness in one's life, and that what ultimately confers satisfaction and happiness are nonmonetary things: satisfying work, close relationships, living a life of meaning. I think that as more people are liberated from the struggle for survival, you're going to have more people who have the luxury of seeking meaning, seeking a sense of purpose, a sense of transcendence.
Look at the work of the Nobel-prize economist Robert William Fogel, talking about "the fourth great awakening." He talks about how the quest for self-realization has expanded from a tight fraction of the planet to much more of it, especially in the developed world. Others call it "meaning-want"—parts of the planet have gone from "material-want" to "meaning-want." Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan calls it a move from materialist values to post-materialist values. I think there's a certain luxury that comes from being materially well off that liberates people to seek something more.
Q: In your earlier book, Free Agent Nation, you said that a globalized workforce will consist more and more of people in business for themselves. What did you mean by that?
Pink: I define a free agent as someone who works untethered from a large organization—a free-lancer, a sole proprietor, the operator of a very small business. That form of working is becoming more common because of technology, because of the radically changed social contract between individuals and organizations, because of structural change within organizations themselves, in part because of the search for meaning we were talking about.
Those are the forces that are causing a lot of people to jump the corporate ship and go out on their own, and other people to be pushed. As for the connection of all this to globalization, it's connected to the extent that it gives people more mobility. There are people who do work for North American companies who might live in Europe or in other places overseas. The buyers of talent now have access to a labor market that isn't just local, that is potentially worldwide, even though this is just beginning to develop. As economies evolve, I think you are going to see more and more people around the world seeking to invent their own ways of working rather than latch themselves permanently on to one organization.
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.