While I was driving through Washington, D.C., recently, a maddeningly familiar scene was unfolding. The GPS seemed determined to ensure that we were never on the same road for more than 1,000 feet, didn’t understand how to navigate a roundabout, instructed me to turn the wrong way down a one-way street — and I was growing so irritated that my wife was threatening me with divorce. Fortunately, at that point, I remembered something I had read that afternoon in the excellent new book of George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen, the memory of which sparked a directive: Work with the GPS; don’t follow it like you’re a robot, and don’t work against it.
The key to success in the world of tomorrow, forecasts Cowen in Average Is Over, is no more complicated than that: Work with the machine.
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