That Used To Be Us Analysis

One of the major issues presented in That Used to Be Us is the U.S.’s substandard education system. Friedman and Mandelbaum explain how the IT revolution and globalization threaten everyone’s job, no matter how secure that job may seem. The level of skill needed for a good job is increasingly being raised, and competition for those jobs is increasing as the IT revolution gives even more people access to cheap tools of connectivity, creativity, and collaboration. This allows an entirely different class of worker to join the marketplace; low-wage and high-skilled. As the staggering growth of IT continues, the world will continue “flattening”, connecting more people and allowing them to interact and compete. The authors contend that these advancements are forcing companies to use online tools to become more

Employment polarization occurs as routine middle-class jobs are eliminated while leaving highly innovative high-level jobs and low-level, mostly manual jobs. The authors divide workers into four groups, based on Katz’s, Autor’s and Kessler’s classifications. These classifications are: creative creators, who do nonroutine work in non routine ways, routine creators, who do routine work in a routine way, creative servers, nonroutine low-skilled workers who do their jobs in inspired ways, and routine servers, who do routine serving work in a routine way. Friedman and Mandelbaum particularly emphasize that nobody is safe, and that both routine creators and servers are at risk of being fired. In this world, America needs more productive companies using tools of hyperconnectivity to produce more with fewer people and more companies which spawn decent-paying jobs. In order to do this, the authors contend that more innovation powered by better education is