Dan Pink on How Half Your Brain Can Save Your Job

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2007

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

Author Dan Pink, talks about the ideas in his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. He argues that the skills of the right side of the brain--skills such as creativity, empathy, contextual thinking and big picture thinking--are going to become increasingly important as a response to competition from low-wage workers overseas and our growing standard of living.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. My guest today is Dan Pink, a contributing editor at Wired and the
0:41.0	author of Free Agent Nation, and most recently, a whole new mind. Dan, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:46.7	Russ, it's great to be here. Dan, your recent book, A Whole New Mind, argues that the right
0:53.4	side of our brains is going to play an increasingly important role in the modern workplace. What do
0:59.6	you mean by that? What do you have in mind? Well, what I'm talking about is really using the
1:06.8	structure of our brain as a metaphor for understanding the contours of business and particularly the contours
1:15.8	of labor markets today. What I mean is that our brains have two sides, left hemisphere and right
1:23.2	hemisphere. There's been a lot of really stupid stuff written about the rights out of the brain
1:29.0	and so forth over the years. In the last several years, the scientists in some ways caught up to
1:34.6	the popularization. What we now know is that our brains are very elegant, very efficient, and they've
1:40.0	done this miraculous job of dividing up tasks. Left side specializes in tasks that are logical, linear,
1:47.0	sequential, analytical, right hemisphere specializes in tasks that are more about processing things
1:53.8	simultaneously, more about understanding context rather than text, more about synthesis rather than
1:59.8	analysis. I think that metaphor explains a lot. My argument is that the sorts of abilities that
2:06.1	used to get people ahead in work were often characteristic of the left hemisphere, the logical,
2:11.9	linear, sequential, analytical, spreadsheet, SAT kind of abilities. And today, those abilities
2:19.7	are absolutely necessary, and I think actually really important to underscore. Those abilities are
2:24.6	absolutely necessary, but they're not sufficient. And the abilities that now matter most are
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