In the next decade, people with STEM will have highest-paying jobs: Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist and author, believes that 2007 was the tipping point for the world. But now, just ahead of 2018, he's also concerned about the power of monopolistic tech giants.

Excerpts from an interview.

What, according to you, is the super story of the world?


There is a through line in all of my columns. The meta argument I present is that the faster the world gets, the more everything slow and old matters. All the stuff that matters today is all the stuff that you cannot download. It's all that you need to upload the old-fashioned way. Examples would include good parenting, good teaching for students, good governance, a good spiritual leader to congregate.

Why is it that important? Because when our power gets this amplified and we are this interconnected, what everyone thinks, feels and believes matters. Because I can now touch you farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than before. As can you. Are we all embracing the golden rule: do unto others as you wish them to do unto you? Every culture and faith has their version of this. It matters more than ever now.

If you have kids, you know there are no filters. They can either go to porn or to physics. The internet is just an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information. There are diamonds and rubies in there. But there are also rusty cans, broken glasses and crooked nails. So, if you aren't building the internal software into your kids to filter those two out, then we are in big trouble.

In your latest book, you speak about us being in an age of dizzying acceleration. What have been the five key changes that have brought us to this point?

Well, I can't reduce it down to just five. But what I do in the book is point to the year 2007. The iPhone came out in 2007. Cloud was born in 2007. Hadoop came out in 2007. That's big data by algorithm. VMware [a subsidiary of Dell Technologies that provides cloud computing] went public in 2007. It enables any operating system to work on any computer so that enabled cloud computing.

Android came out in 2007. The Kindle came out in 2007. So, I would argue that there was a huge step up in 2007. And when it did, it changed different kinds of powers. It changed the power of one.

So, what one person can do today as a maker or breaker is unlike anything we've seen before. President Trump can sit at home and tweet to a billion people without an editor or filter. What's really scary is that the head of ISIS can do that too. The power of machines has changed. Machines are acquiring all five senses. We've never lived in a world like this before.

The power of flows has changed. Ideas flow and change and circulate so fast that we have gone from a world of walls to a world of webs. You want to be in touch with the flow now — the flows of ideas, innovation, education, trade. That's how you get rich, not by hoarding stocks.

We are living in a world where the winner takes all, especially with tech companies like Facebook and Google dominating the landscape...

There is a concern to that. These are big behemoths: Alibaba, Tencent, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Netflix. They can just buy up any competitor and absorb it now. Facebook sees Instagram. Buys it. We don't yet fully understand the monopolistic, innovation implications of this.

On one hand, [there is] so much benefit from Google. I could never write my books without Google. I could never live without Google. Yet Google's so big, that there cannot be a competitor. So it's a real tension in all of us. We are going to have to figure out the right regulatory policies for these giant systems. They are bigger than governments. They can stomp out anybody.

You've spoken about the curiosity quotient plus passion quotient being greater than the intelligence quotient. How does one apply this when hiring?

NR Narayana Murthy, Friedman and Nilekani (Image: BCCL)

More and more businesses are finding a way to hire not only on the basis of pedigree but on the basis of what you can do. Most businesses don't care about what you know. They only care about what you can do with what you know. Those are two different things. They are finding ways to actually test that. What you know today will be outdated in a week or a year. But are you a life-long learner? That's why one of my teachers says, "Never ask a kid today what you want to be when you grow up. Only ask them how you want to be." Do you have an agile learning mindset? Learning is so much more important than knowing when change happens fast.

People who can combine STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) and relate it to humans will have the highest paying jobs. Steve Jobs was brilliant at this. He was not the best programmer. But he combined empathy and enough STEM to invent this baby [pointing to his iPhone].

Jobs didn't have the image of being the most empathetic leader…

I knew Steve very well. He was a friend of mine. And we all have our personality quirks. But he had a remarkable emotional quotient. He was not empathetic in all the right ways. He had a real sense of excellence and he wouldn't accept anything else. He was tough on all the right things.

Are we living in a post-truth world, where the ability to spin a narrative over social media makes successful leaders?

I'll confess something. I'm not on Facebook and I never look at Twitter. If you come to me and say, "I have a new book out. Tom will you tweet about it?", I give it to my secretary. She tweets. I have no idea how to. So, if people are building their reputation in those places, I don't know about it. And if you are tweeting about me, I don't know about that either. I'm not the least bit interested in what someone says about me in 140 characters. My philosophy is that I'm always onto the next thing.