Average Truly Is Over – how to operate within the terrifying trends of today’s work
When the economy no longer rewards doing the work.
We are familiar with superstar economy from the world of entertainment where the winner takes all. An artist from the bottom 50% doesn’t make a living from their art, therefore is not a professional—while the top fly private. Their work may look similar. The outcomes are not.
An even more uncomfortable reality is that this model is no longer confined to entertainment. We have rockstar journalists, coders, marketers, interior designers, bakers. Their superstardom is justified by follower count, influence, and impact that can be measured in likes and clicks.
In the professional world, we know the impact of a bad marketer or a bad coder is not just zero, it can even become negative as their lack of talent creates more work for the rest of the team. Envision a PR scandal due to a bad social media post, or code that breaks a live product people are using.
While it’s easy to clutch our pearls and question the greedy corporations… the other way to look at it is to ask: well, are they wrong?
Julie Jones is a popular interior designer – screenshot from her website
This current nightmare was predicted in a book I read over 8 years ago: Average Is Over, written by economist Tyler Cowen.
To understand what’s happening, here is his core assumption on what the current global economy values.
What is scarce:
1. Quality land and natural resources
2. Intellectual property
3. Quality labor with unique skills
What is not scarce:1. Unskilled labor, as more countries join the global economy
2. “Simple capital” – money in the bank or held in government securities (already has negative rates of return)
Cowen’s book was theoretical.
His prediction reads like our present.
The pillar of his thesis relies on these three trends:
1. The value of “cheap labour” is plummeting.
There used to be a stable middle; one for those “good enough” to build a career. Now as companies can precisely measure output across a global workforce; Cowen describes a harsh reality:
The economy increasingly rewards the best, and filters out the rest.
2. Talking to computers is the superpower to adopt.
AI makes this trend obvious.
It is no longer required to manually do the work, as long as you can request the required output. The best can even produce 10x or even 100x more than the average.
And crucially: the machines already exist. The value is not in creating the machines; it’s in directing them.
That means deciding:
what to do
how to frame it
how to get the best output
3. Marketing matters more than anything else.
With execution now so cheap, the real constraint is reaching the right people.
The Takeaway – It’s All Narrative
The basic model [of this new reality] favors people who can blend computer expertise with an understanding of how to communicate with other people.
I keep hearing from the world of technology that even highly skilled programmers are increasingly becoming project managers, i.e. defining what they need and kicking off processes while not really needing to do any “manual labour” themselves.
All work is becoming a task of communication; whether it is with your team, your management, your audience, your customers. And now even: with your preferred LLM.
In a world where “prompt specialist” is becoming an in-demand profession; “a narrative engineer” can earn up to 750k annually (reference)… both of which could be classified as: clear communication.
Everything is becoming these three things: narrative, coordination, communication.
As the specific tasks requiring manual labour can be outsourced to cheap labour or automated by machines, what matters is figuring out what to ask for. What do we outsource and why is that worth paying for?
As the value of doing the work plummets,
the most valuable skill in the economy becomes clarity of thought.
