I just opened my (Kindle) copy of The Complacent Class. He describes three complacent sub-groups. First is “the privileged class.”
the wealthiest and best educated 3 to 5 percent of the American population
This is Charles Murray’s Belmont (or Neal Stephenson’s Vickies). It is easy to see why they might feel complacent.
The third group is “those who get stuck.”
Their pasts, presents, and futures are pretty bad. . .A lot of these people never really had a fair chance.
This is Charles Murray’s Fishtown (or Neal Stephenson’s Thetes). I think it is a stretch to put them in the “complacent” class. Tyler himself says that “they are not happy about their situations.” They are just not capable or motivated to do what is required to change.
Anyway, I need to read more than a page or two before reviewing the book.
I feel like the contradiction of the Trump/Conservative movement is why is Tyler Cowen complaining about the Complacent Class versus the lower classes? Didn’t he write Average is Over and most applauds immigration and free trade that probably has impacted the rural WWC? Most of the well off 3 – 5% are successful private sector or children of this private sector. (Trump did beat HRC in higher incomes although margin was smaller than 2012 Romney margin.)
Also, how much of the modern WWC is simply the Charles Murray’s ‘Bell Curve’ impacting their lives? Is it possible that all the smartest young WWC of yesteryear have moved away to the urban cities leaving behind the less productive? (So this is slower moving version of what happened to African-American ghettos in the 1970s and 1980s with desegregation.)
Anyway, reading Charles Murray it appears he only cares about poor communities when they are the communities he grew up in? (Although I don’t think Iowa is fits the WWC failing communities.)
I’m looking forward to reading Cowen’s book, but based on some things I’ve read about it, I have a feeling that I’m going to be uneasy about his choice of words though the ideas may still be strong.
Is complacent the right word to use for what he’s describing? How about the “matchers” and “strivers”?
economic determinism is real .. IQ is becoming America’s new caste system.. The people who are stuck may not be smart enough to learn the skills required to become unstuck.
It reminds me of Taleb, Peltzman and Trump.
Are we taking less risk because there’s more to lose, because there’s fewer opportunities, because we love comfort, or because our institutional settings don’t support it? Perhaps Trump is the revival we need to take us out of this stagnancy and avoid decline. My discussion below
https://educationreformaustralia.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/cowen-peltzman-taleb-trump-and-the-complacent-class/
Anyone who has been in the military knows the feeling. “This is gong to be a fiasco, but nothing can prevent that unless there is the pressure of immanent catastrophe, so we’re going to have a disaster of unknown magnitude, and hopefully we’ll be able to fix it then.”
Same thing happens in plenty of corporations.
So there is plenty of complacency to go around.
However. Hansonian medicine and insights of political economy tells us that sometimes complacency and benign neglect is the best course of action, because people really aren’t that good at predicting the future when things get complicated. It’s hard to tell the predictable disasters apart from a kind of unreliable communal whining session which exagerates confidence in shared understanding and complaints and serves other social purposes.
THere are plenty of professional doomsayers out there, and most are wrong.
So leaders and decision makers often tune out the warnings they dislike, and overemphasize the ones that confirm their prior worldview, or which are useful to their goals.
It’s hard for a layman to separate the gold from the dross. How are we to avoid meta-complacency and the exhaustion of the hard task of distinguishing valid complacency warnings from all the illegitimate ones?
It’s a real dilemma. We must rely on experts, but experts are unreliable.
+ infinity