Average Is Over (In Everything)

How the middle is hollowing out in work, marriage, and even church

There's been a lot of talk lately about the way AI is making many entry-to-mid-level jobs obsolete.

One person who saw this coming well before LLMs arrived was the economist Tyler Cowen. In his 2013 book Average Is Over, he predicted that AI — what he broadly described as “intelligent machines” — would swallow up entire sectors of the workforce, particularly jobs that didn’t require a lot of education, skill, or talent. Things like data entry, customer support, and clerical tasks were prime targets for automation.

Even before intelligent machines arrived at scale, Cowen observed, making a decent living as an average worker was becoming harder and harder to do. He described a world in which especially driven and gifted individuals would continue to do well and leap ahead of the pack, while average individuals would be pulled down. The labor market would become increasingly bifurcated, taking on a barbell shape: on one end, people doing very well; on the other, people doing very poorly; and in between, a thinning middle.

The economic forces Cowen described a decade ago have only accelerated. Technology and globalization continue to create "winner-take-all" dynamics. A small slice of "hyperproductive" workers or owners capture outsized rewards. Meanwhile, middle-skill jobs disappear. If your job can be done by an algorithm, a spreadsheet, or a call center worker halfway across the globe, chances are it will be.

According to Cowen, to succeed in today's work world, you've got to be above average. You need to be really exceptional at your work, as well as really exceptional at promoting yourself; Cowen also predicted that marketing — the ability to stand out among global competitors — would become an even more critical skill.

While Cowen focused on the world of work, I’ve found the “average is over” concept to be a useful mental model for thinking about much more. Once you understand it, you start seeing it everywhere, and it’s quite fundamental for making sense of the modern landscape.

Let’s explore where average is over is playing out, why the dynamic is happening, and what individuals can do to navigate a world where being just “okay” is no longer okay.