Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

Top positive review

Many thought-provoking ideas

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2017

I am quite surprised (pleasantly so) by some of the ways Tyler Cowen's thinking has developed. This latest book shows a greater amount of intellectual intellectual development than his previous The Great Stagnation. Most pleasing to me was his embrace of cyclical views of history in his final chapter. Though I would like to have seen an appreciation on his part for Peter Turchin's books on patterns in history.

Tyler thinks we're too complacent and too sheltered in our cocoons. He thinks our society is becoming too averse to change. This shows up as NIMBY zoning ordinances, few job switches, less entrepreneurship, and greater willingness to accept the established order. Safe spaces at colleges can be seen as a manifestation of this phenomenon.

As complementary reading for this book I would recommend Peter Turchin's War & Peace & War as an excellent intro to recurring patterns in history. I would also recommend Bill Bishop's The Big Sort about how Americans are migrating to live near people who think like them and live like them.

Cowen does a fairly good job of bringing up many contemporary political issues while not betraying a strong partisan bias. Though it's clear he's trying to pitch his ideas more to appeal to a left-leaning readership. At points his own willingness to stay within the boundaries of politically correct thought places limits on his ability to find and explain patterns. But keep reading through those sections. He gets back to very worthwhile insights in later sections.

What disturbs me about this book is that Tyler has reached a number of conclusions similar to mine about cyclical history but by his own different intellectual path. This unfortunately increases my own assessment of the odds that I'm right to expect a bumpier and possibly much more tragic future.

15 people found this helpful

Top critical review

Critical reviews›

John T. Landry

Good overall argument, but thin and pessimistic

Reviewed in the United States on May 19, 2017

I came to this book with high expectations after reading Average is Over, but as others have said, this one covers a lot of ground and doesn't have the depth of argument or authority. I would have preferred a book that focused on complacency in the economy and tackled the big question now: will the new wave of technology (AI, 3D printing, internet-of-things, extreme mobility) end our decline in productivity growth, in business investment, and in competition? It could have still had a chapter on how these technologies might have wide social ramifications, as a kind of updating of Average is Over.
That said, the book is a useful collection of a lot of interesting trends, especially on declining mobility. And the overall argument is very important -- speaking as someone in the business world where there's still too much talk about the supposed extreme dynamism of the internet age.
I also found the book unnecessarily pessimistic. It's almost as though the author thinks complacency is bad in itself, so he wants to scare us into thinking terrible things are on the horizon. Most of the book is about good news -- we're complacent for a reason -- but the book keeps trying to suggest a dark side. Surely there is a dark side to all these developments (and the opioid etc crisis is a real problem), but we've handled far worse and still achieved a society that's amazingly better than what we had in previous centuries on just about every dimension. The very end of the book briefly takes up Stephen Pinker's Better Angels book, but doesn't take that powerful argument for social progress seriously. There's also no mention of Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms, which makes a similar if less obvious argument about economics.
The book almost bizarrely suggests that the current violence in the Middle East and Ukraine is strong evidence of cyclicality in world affairs, not progress -- and cites the ancient Greek view that true progress is an illusion. I think what the book really means is that progress is often a matter of two steps forward and one step back, and we might be in for an extended period of stepping back.
Finally, the book has almost nothing to say about how we might be developing new kinds of restlessness that might be more positive, less disruptive than the restlessness it predicts. It doesn't look at how people have been exploring all sorts of new dimensions in culture and religion -- all of which makes sense simply on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Affluence really does change how we deal with the world.

17 people found this helpful

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From the United States

Chad R.

How prescient!

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2022

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Reading this book five years after it was published makes Tyler Cowen seem like some sort of wizard, with so many of the discussions coming to terrifyingly accurate fruition. Increased crime, global conflicts, riots, illiberalism, campus unrest... The cyclical model appears to be, at least right now, a valid approach to developing an understanding of history, economics, and politics. It aligns with my own prejudices and philosophy, but that is largely due to the nature of these subjects from my own limited study of them.

Tyler Cowen has an easy-going, conversational style to his writing that makes the complex subject matter easily digestible without being primarily comprised of flimsy, uncited speculations. Solid references, strong argumentation, and reasonable conclusions make this an accessible volume, like all of his work.

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Patrick M.

Rich, educated people mix with like people

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2022

Observations as old as mankind, mainly people are self-selecting and biased towards their own class and kind. Yet Cowen presents this as an aberration, not default human nature, and is the cause of American decline. NIMBY is a favorite Cowen term, but conveniently ignores the fact that American cities some 200 years on, like Manhattan, simply can't grow much anymore, and places like San Francisco are now globally desirable. Moreover, California with 40 million+ people needs to build more?

One person found this helpful

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Brian Sachetta

Was hoping for more

Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2021

I was drawn in by this one’s title and cover — it seemed like it would be a fun, and possibly even controversial, take on where the country is headed. I’d never heard of the author before, but I was interested enough in the book’s description, so I gave it a shot.

You can never really know what a book is going to be like heading into it, but I do think I should’ve paid a bit more attention to the reviews of this one. They seem to reflect what I found in the end — a narrative that lacked cohesion, emotion, and much of a conclusion.

For most of the audiobook (I listened to this one, btw), I felt like I was hearing the passive reading of a research study’s results — there were loads of statistics, but none of them really linked to a larger narrative or made you feel connected to a central theme.

There were many different topics covered in it as well, but they all seemed somewhat disjointed. I heard a lot about “matching” and “segregation,” two things I didn’t expect when looking at the book’s title, but not enough about complacency. Sure, there’s a little bit of that subject in this one, but not enough.

On a closing note, I’ll say I did notice that some other reviews cited political arguments as the problem with this one. To be honest, I didn’t feel the same way; to me, it didn’t seem politically charged at all. It was just a bit boring.

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Amazon Customer

Reminds readers why economics can be a soft science

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2021

Verified Purchase

More of a social commentary and anecdotal evidence erring on the side of cultural critique (maybe even macro psychology or sociology) than a work of economics. Cowen doesn’t do a great job of embedding statistics - it’s more subjective than what I usually read. Not well written, redundant, and not worth the read if you enjoy more factual works

8 people found this helpful

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A. Landry

Too liberal for me

Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2021

Verified Purchase

started to read it but just can't get past the author's political views. I believe the US has enough people writing about this, so to me this was beating a dead horse.
Going to take a break from reading any material generated by members of the main stream media

5 people found this helpful

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Chad M

The US economic pie is growing slowly, but the depth or quality of the economic pie is improving

Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2020

In this very thorough and accurate overview of the American jobs picture and economic issues one is given example after example of slow growth or what has been called the "new normal". Middle class people are under pressure: housing is about 30%, taxes 40%, and personal expenses about 25%, leaving just 5% or so for savings. The author give examples of rising housing costs that have been tracking along with very slow wage growth, creating an income and savings crunch. Most trends that went against the middle and working classes emerged in the 1970s, but there is a silver lining.

People who leverage high-tech, from using laptops at cafes and libraries, maximize the internet, and combine this with healthy amounts of government benefits can improve their quality of life if not their total income or assets. Single people can live very enjoyable lives in this scenario, and put in long hours at their careers. The counter to this view, however, is that lower living standards cause people to delay marriage. Also, once people marry and start families, and buy a condo or a house, the costs increase again, with frequently negative effects on the marriage. This has widespread effects on society which we are still trying to understand. Government policies that try to offset the negative aspects of late marriage (28 to 35, and older) have only provided token financial benefits, and are still not managing to turn this trend around (for centuries in America, people married between age 21 and 25 on average).

On this "back of the envelope" view, which only touches on the great detail of this book, one could say that "a penny saved is a penny earned", that new state and local policy that allows smaller homes and apartments will substantially help the middle class, safer highways and commuter rail, more reliable police services and, of course, more equitable healthcare. By incrementally advancing every sector we improve life. This won't be a productivity revolution like in the 1960s but it may be the best we can do in the short term. As for major productivity increases we look to basic science, new energy systems like Gen IV nuclear reactors, efficient food production, and reforms at the UN. Cooperation from China, Russia, and India will be crucial and this may be where the domestic economic outlook merges with the international system. US growth over the long haul will require both a competitive attitude at home with good will, fair diplomacy, and new treaties with the world's major powers.

One person found this helpful

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T. Burket

Interesting to compare 3-4 years later

Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2020

Recently I heard TC say that he doesn't expect hardly any books to last very long or to remain in the consciousness very far out. A book like this is certainly "of the moment" to a large degree, as he talked about things as they were and as they were right then, with concern about the future.

His primary observation and worry is the decline in American dynamism, and also for much of the world, too. He is interested in the root causes of that decline, its recent consequences and whether it can be improved, which he seems to doubt, at least then. The reasons make for excellent reading and largely stand up in 2020, as the core principles are long-term trends and not singular events, such as the financial crisis around 2008-09, that can come and go. Some events may be anomalies and some may be related to these trends, similar to the sense that some people argue that weather will be more severe as climate change expands. Or maybe the opposite, where more economic and societal stasis smooths out trends.

Here in 2020 we have the pandemic, protests and economic and cultural turmoil. That has certainly boosted dynamism in some vectors as people and institutions scramble like crazy and many people protest energetically. I was amused to see the section where TC wonders why people don't riot as much as they used to. But then even in the trouble this year, it's nothing like the peak days he recounts.

Some of the topics may be familiar these days, and his takes on assortative matching and other contributors to the status quo are well done, if maybe not as fresh as they might have been when the book was new. His insights are solid.

Related to the decline in dynamism and many correlated factors is the desire for more safety, often with the growing administrative and welfare state providing more of that safety with its own consequences. I'd bet in an update to this book, the author would expect 2020 to energize even more of that.

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