Name: The Complacent Class
ISBN: 9781250108692

The Complacent Class

Examines the trend of Americans away from the traditionally mobile, risk-accepting, and adaptable tendencies that defined them for much of recent history, and toward stagnation and comfort, and how this development has the potential to make future changes more disruptive. --Publisher's description.

What Hacker News says

adolphFeb 2024

Living with others (parents, partners, etc) is something that decreases core costs of domiciling anywhere you go. That is an excellent method of maximizing revenue while not abandoning your family.

Otherwise, see The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen.

https://www.amazon.com/Complacent-Class-Self-Defeating-Quest...

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AlchemistCampJan 2020

> "If you think more young people should be spending their time doing research and development and less people should be doing management consulting then the answer is simple. Subsidize it."

He is. Tyler Cowen lead the creation of Emergent Ventures. (https://www.mercatus.org/emergentventures)

From the opening of their application which he shared on his blog:

> "We want to jumpstart high-reward ideas—moonshots in many cases—that advance prosperity, opportunity, liberty, and well-being. We welcome the unusual and the unorthodox.

> Our goal is positive social change, but we do not mind if you make a profit from your project. (Indeed, a quick path to revenue self-sufficiency is a feature not a bug!)

> Projects will either be fellowships or grants: fellowships involve time in residence at the Mercatus Center in Northern Virginia; grants are one-time or slightly staggered payments to support a project.

> We encourage you to think big, but we also will consider very small grants or short fellowships if they might change the trajectory of your life. We encourage applications from all ages and all parts of the world."

Incredibly, they're taking no stake in successful ventures. They're just subsidizing high-reward ideas to encourage them.

If you read The Complacent Class and Stubborn Attachments—both highly recommended, you'll get a better idea of where Tyler is coming from and why this issue of decreasing dynamism is an issue he's so concerned about.

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jseligerNov 2018

This is a fine thing to do with $1.8B and that amount could be used in worse ways. Still:

Together, the federal and state governments should make a new commitment to improving access to college and reducing the often prohibitive burdens debt places on so many students and families.

There may be no better investment that we can make in the future of the American dream — and the promise of equal opportunity for all.

At the moment, zero incentivizes colleges to reduce costs. If they can get a student in the door, the federal government will ensure that student loans are available and that the college gets paid no matter what happens to the student. Regulators, in the meantime, work hard to ensure that colleges and especially universities face little competition.

So we get an array of problems: we are all, in a way, paying for the party: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz.... Already prestigious schools like Hopkins compete primarily to raise their own prestige, rather than improve access. Why do most such schools admit fewer students per capita than they did in 1950? Why are they so interested in discriminatory children-of-alumni admissions?

While I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, I've been involved in post-secondary education for too long, and read too many books on it (Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation is recommended, as is his book The Complacent Class), to think that "more money, same system" is the answer. We need comprehensive, systemic reform, starting with the accreditation bodies, before we pour more money in.

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anubisresourcesMay 2017

Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen have a lot to say about this subject. The argument boils down to regulatory and cultural pressures have caused innovation to slow down drastically since the 1970s in all areas but ICT.

I strongly suggest you read "The Complacent Class" if this is a subject that interests you

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ArkyBeagleDec 2016

Okay, so one activity that is undergoing significant automation is flying jetliners. ADS-B is mandated like in a year or two.

This is for safety reasons. That happens to be one case where quality prevents really unfortunate outcomes ( an air crash ) but there's no way to take the side of pilots in this argument.

That is why you automate. You automate to improve repeatability of production. If the humans are breaking things - including themselves or other humans - then it is immoral to oppose it, regardless of how it affects our accounting and economic assumptions.

This also leaves craftspeople to make numismatically interesting objects, which is a Big Thing - look at Etsy.

I like the way it is blurbed in Tyler Cowen's latest book "The Complacent Class":

https://www.amazon.com/Complacent-Class-Self-Defeating-Quest...

"The problem, according to legendary blogger, economist and best selling author Tyler Cowen, is that Americans today have broken from this tradition―we’re working harder than ever to avoid change. We're moving residences less, marrying people more like ourselves and choosing our music and our mates based on algorithms that wall us off from anything that might be too new or too different. Match.com matches us in love. Spotify and Pandora match us in music. Facebook matches us to just about everything else."

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dalbasalAug 2021

Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue.

Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the spectrum. Same observation.

On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administration not have become more efficient because of computers?

A factory's productivity, which has legible inputs and outputs is really different to something which doesn't.

Software is management technology, perhaps, but only in cases that management technology is pretty efficient already. Modern warehouses, ports and stuff are more productive because of software. But, they we already pretty efficient. They already had pretty well formalized, legible processes.

That said, software is also a tool. Say your job is to receive applications, payments or such. You process them. File. Respond. Software is undeniably a good tool for such things. We can't abstract that away by looking at the top level trends. It is a productivity tool for administrative tasks. Top line trends don't suggest a productivity gain, but I'm not willing to conclude that software is not an administrative tool.

On the face of it, banks, universities, government departments, the legal sector, accounting, perhaps the whole finance sector are bigger today, not smaller. They have computers now, which are productivity tools. WTF is going on?

Do we have more justice, better records? What is "productivity" anyway, outside of legible productivity like a factory's?

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