Goodreads review of The Complacent Class

Today I wrote a Goodreads review that was long enough to make me feel satisfied with my “amount of time spent thinking critically and writing” for this weekend, so I’m just posting it here.

If you’re reading this and use Goodreads, I’d love to add you!

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American DreamThe Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cowen makes a compelling case that technological innovation and social innovation and political competency have slowed down dramatically over the past 3 years, that individuals are largely okay with this, and that our institutions make it difficult to change this. This complacency has benefits such as increased safety and increased ability to satisfy certain kinds of preferences (like cheap access to nearly unlimited movies, books, and music), and makes sense for individuals in the short-term. But in the long-term it means that we will improve less as a society, making life worse for people down the line.

Cowen makes some of his points by leaning on his own intuition for how society has changed (e.g., when he says that the U.S. is more segregated in terms of “overall feel”). But these intuitive judgement are important to making his arguments mentally sticky, and I believe that he has both the statistics and the credentials as a generally open-minded devourer of cultural information to back up these sorts of claims. In fact I think that what is jarring is not that he leans on intuition when making arguments, but that he is so much more open about the cases where he does this than are other social science authors.

The book was published in 2016, and two 2020 issues jumped out to me after reading the book:
1. If you accept this account of complacency, it's very predictable that we would be terribly-prepared for something like COVID-19. Cowen writes “At some point this country will face an immediate crisis, and there won’t quite be the resources or more fundamentally the flexibility, to handle it...Building good institutions and capabilities very quickly is no longer something the American public sector is very good at.” And “As soon as Americans have to rely on their government to do something new and concrete — whether at home or in the realm of foreign policy or public health or the environment — low levels of trust will make that more difficult.” All this, unfortunately, checks out as we've seen.
2. Cowen calls out the civil unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore as potential signs that change is coming - that people are truly acting out their frustration instead of simply voicing it online. The protests and riots we’ve seen this summer in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing are a stronger sign that at the very least complacency with racial injustice may be on its way out.

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Additional facts from the book that might be of interest:

  • The crime rate hasn’t gone down as much since the 90s as people often think, because internet crime became possible during the 90s, and there is a lot of internet crime as people think because a lot of it moved online

  • Greater inequality is correlated with reduced protest participation

  • Segregation is up by race and income And distressingly, the most segregated cities (in terms of working class/non-working class) are often those seen as the very trendy cities: LA, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, DC, Raleigh, SF. Even though people say they don’t like segregation by race or class, they vote with their feet by moving to very segregated cities