The Complacent Class (Tyler Cowen)

“And if isolation isn’t enough to induce stagnation, there is the matter of their long lives. On Earth, we have a continuous influx of young people who are willing to change because they haven’t had time to grow hard set in their ways.” Plainclothesman Bailey, hero of Isaac Asimov’s seminal science fiction Robot Series thus describes the weakness of the planet Solaria, in which all work is performed by robots, and the fabulously rich inhabitants have no chaos with which to stimulate fresh ideas. Tyler Cohen’s The Complacent Class argues a similar case for America in 2016, in which comfort is clung to at the cost of dynamism, and societal and technological developments have conspired to reduce variability in the everyday lives of most Americans. 

Tyler Cowen, a voracious consumer and synthesiser of information, brought to bear his wide-ranging knowledge to argue from many different angles a central point - that we are consciously and unconsciously reducing the disruption and uncertainty in our lives, sometimes to our benefit, but often not. There is reduced variation stemming from the efficiency of ‘matching’ technology - from dating apps to music apps to restaurant recommendation sites. These contain benefits - unwanted pets seldom languish in cages and are picked up by suitable homes, a used copy of War and Peace can be found for one cent, and LinkedIn makes the labour market more efficient for all parties. 

However, our desire to smoothen out life has its costs. Cities have higher levels of productivity, but NIMBYism (not in my back yard) has led to a lack of change in neighbourhoods as soon as residents are well enough off to lobby local authorities, increasing cost of living, and reducing the dynamism that comes from population influx. Americans are less likely than before to move for work, and moving into many professions has been restricted by increasing licensure - from electricians to yoga teachers to taxi drivers and barbers, people protect their professions not through being competitive, but by way of legal restrictions of trade. Regulation has made it more difficult to fire workers than ever before, and whilst inequality has increased, social mobility stems only from immigration, rather than Americans moving upwards in income groups. 

All this leads Cowen to conclude firstly, that relative to upcoming (especially Asian) economies America lacks dynamism and innovation (Silicon Valley being the exception), and secondly, that such burying of fragility will eventually result in greater disruption. He argues that the housing market failed in 2007 because poor people were the first to show the signs of over indebtedness; that the fine art market also suffered but was naturally a later casualty because those involved in the market were well off; that America’s storing of fragility buried racial tensions that would eventually surface at the point most vulnerable rather than at the root cause. In this way he argues, the election of Donald Trump is a symptom rather than the cause of America’s problems. 

This brings us to the most frequent criticism of Cowen’s book. It is an assertion some say, that was out of date before the book went to print. Cowen argues that we don’t protest as vigorously as we did in the 1960s, that political activism is benign, arguing as it were, that all is quiet, too quiet, on the western front. Trump’s election came just as the book went to print, and so Cowen was able to add a couple of mentions, but largely the Trump phenomena was left out of the analysis - and is arguably contrary to his points. 

I disagree with this criticism. Firstly, the ensuing chaos in American political life vindicates Cowen’s prediction of a reckoning (particularly in terms of protests), whilst Trump’s actual policies were far more business-as-usual than his anti-establishment rhetoric promised. Secondly, reading books that were very much of their time can be more revealing than the author could know, for often it is the hidden assumptions, unbeknownst to the author, that give the most information about the thinking of the time. Reading George Orwell’s articles written during the war, one detects a consensus long since discarded that socialism is more economically efficient than capitalism. In The Complacent Class, as is so often the case, Cowen takes temporal technological situations to be the new state of play. For example, the fact that we consume music through streaming services means we give new music less of a chance, and thus less meaningful music will prevail. That it took Cowen five listens of Astral Weeks to fall in love with it is offered as justification for this assertion. But vinyl sales are at an all time high, and the format of course lends itself to slower, more in depth consumption of music than CDs. Similarly, Cowen bemoans that teenagers now care more about their first iPhone than their first car. This too is perhaps a transitory state of affairs - new, non-internet, non-distracting phones are high in fashion, and electric driverless cars may become Apple’s signature product in the coming years. The point is, that oftentimes supposed changes in society are transitions that happen over a longer period than it takes an eager author to write a book, and reading supposedly out-of-date books teaches us to pay less attention to every ‘trend’.

That The Complacent Class was written four years after Nicolas Nassim Taleb published Antifragile (which Cowen unquestionably read) is surprising. Antifragile, a book about how things gain from disorder, contains a far more lucid and comprehensive version of the same argument than Cowen’s journalistic work. It is Cowen’s writing style to lay out a counter-intuitive argument and let the reader come up with their own solution, or wait for his next book to see the further development in his line of thought. This leads to short and interesting books, of which Cowen has written many, but in this instance one feels that he could have addressed the issues in more depth. Cowen outlines three groups in American society responsible for the torpor he describes. These are the privileged class, who are wealthy, liberal, and intelligent; those who ‘dig in’, homeowners who are moderately successful but fearful of losing the position they have gained in society; and those who get stuck - poor people with no ability to get out of their predicament.

From identifying these three groups early in the book, the categories are largely absent from Cowen’s subsequent analysis. Yet they are surely critical. The first and second groups use regulatory capture to reduce any disruption they can, whilst the third group is often powerless - and so the two require entirely different treatments. For all their supposed dynamism, the behemoths of Silicon Valley are amongst the largest political contributors in corporate America, using legal means to cement their dominance rather than innovation. This is a practice that is especially prevalent in American society where financial contributions are brazenly pursued by politicians, and quid-pro-quo is as open as could be without outright corruption. That firms can essentially use market power to retain market power is one of many examples of retrenchment in American society. Another is the composition of top university attendees reflecting the top economic status of the attendee’s parents. The lack of social mobility from the very poorest members of society upwards obviously has many causes, but a lack of healthcare, good education or social safety net for those at the bottom are unquestionably factors. Whatever one’s political affiliations, a very different policy response is required for those wishing to retard positive change as is needed for those willing but unable to enact it. 
The umbrella term ‘complacency’ in Cowen’s context reflects on the one hand, those in powerful positions being able to entrench themselves by legal means, and on the other, those in poverty unable to break through a glass ceiling. When viewed in this way, neither is especially complacent. For all it’s insight and enjoyable writing, The Complacent Class fails to adequately address the problem and consequently offers no solution to America’s problems, be it in 2016 or today.