Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation is a 2013 book by American economist Tyler Cowen laying out his vision for the future trajectory of the global economy.

[1] It is a sequel to Cowen's 2011 pamphlet The Great Stagnation, which argued that America had exhausted many of the low-hanging fruit (such as cheap land and easily achievable improvements in education) that had powered its growth in the 19th and early 20th century.

Cowen forecasts that modern economies are delaminating into two groups: a small minority of highly educated people who are capable of working collaboratively with automated systems will become a wealthy aristocracy; the vast majority will earn little or nothing, surviving on low-priced goods created by the first group, living in shantytowns, working with highly automated production systems.

[2] The author celebrates the arrival of functional online education, mostly because it allows a much broader audience to keep up with rapid change at a price that everyone can afford and which leverages the same sort of self-teaching that drives video game players to ever-greater achievements.

He notes that Average Is Over apparently contradicts Cowen's previous book, The Great Stagnation – whereas that book argued (to quote Yglesias) "that the median household in rich countries had suffered stagnant living standards thanks to a slowdown in technological progress," Average Is Over argues that "the median household in rich countries will suffer stagnant living standards thanks to a speedup in technological progress."

Yglesias proposes that the contradiction is resolved because "read in conjunction it's clear that in neither period was the stagnation actually caused by the pace of technological change ... scratch the surface and you'll see that Cowen actually thinks there's a policy reform agenda that, if implemented in a timely fashion, would channel much more of the gains of future automation and computerization to the median household."