The Complacent Class Quotes

“It is often a puzzle for foreigners why the United States has such a dismal performance when it comes to murder, guns, and mental illness, all features of American life that, when compared to most of the other wealthy countries, are so awful they do not require further documentation. You might wonder how those bad results square with America’s relatively strong performances on most social capital indices, such as trust, cooperation, and charitable philanthropy; on philanthropy, we even rate as the global number one. The truth is that those positive and negative facets are two sides of the same coin: Cooperation is very often furthered by segregating those who do not fit in. That creates some superclusters of cooperation among the quality cooperators and a fair amount of chaos and dysfunctionality elsewhere.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“But once again, there is some disappointing news, as the income of the median or typical American household is down since 2000, and unless wage gains are very strong in the next few years, this country essentially will have gone twenty years with wage stagnation or near wage stagnation for median earners.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Therefore, I wish to say it again: The biggest story of the last fifteen years, both nationally and globally, is the growing likelihood that a cyclical model of history will be a better predictor than a model of ongoing progress.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Millennials as a generation just don’t seem that interested in grand projects, unless of course you count wired interconnectivity, at which they excel.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“As chain stores rise, there is also a loss of dynamism, competition, and market entry for new ideas and products. Keep in mind that today’s major chain was once a small individual store on a street somewhere. A bit more economic chaos, even if it is inconvenient in the short run, actually tends to be correlated with higher rates of innovation.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Americans are in fact working much harder than before to postpone change, or to avoid it altogether, and that is true whether we’re talking about corporate competition, changing residences or jobs, or building things. In an age when it is easier than ever before to dig in, the psychological resistance to change has become progressively stronger. On”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond has estimated that 61 percent of all private-sector financial liabilities are guaranteed by the federal government, either explicitly or implicitly. As recently as 1999, this figure was below 50 percent.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Consider a simple comparison: The American government spends more on Americans’ health care (per capita) than the French government spends on their entire health care system (again in per capita terms). It is a fair criticism that some individuals are left out of this coverage, or perhaps too much is sent to doctors and hospitals, but using some very plausible metrics, the American government is more involved in health care than is the French government.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“In other words, a culture of the casual is a culture of people who already have achieved something and who already can prove it. It is a culture of the static and the settled, the opposite of Tocqueville’s restless Americans.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Americans at the top have become the experts in countersignaling, because they don’t feel they have to impress anyone. Everything is now casual, because the new aristocracy of talent enforces all the conformity that is needed. The”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Oscar Mayer, the food products company, is marketing Sizzl, a dating app that tries to pair people on the basis of whether they share a common taste for a preferred kind of bacon. Why”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Even four-year college graduates earned higher starting salaries in 2000 than they do today, by about seven to eight percentage points—assuming they get a job. This”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“If we look at all metropolitan areas, rather than just the large ones, Durham–Chapel Hill, Bloomington, and Ann Arbor—all college towns—climb into the top five for segregation of the working class away from the non–working class. That”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Compare today to the 1950s. At that time, a typical apartment in New York City rented for about $60 a month, or, adjusting for inflation, about $530 a month. Today you can’t find a broom closet in the East Village for that amount. Even”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Somehow kids are supposed to match the levels of calm and composure we might find in mature forty-seven-year-olds. Estimates”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“A more recent study showed that of the couples who married between 2005 and 2012, more than one-third of them met online; for same-sex couples, that figure is almost 70 percent. Even”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“The great adventures of life, the surprise of strangers, of strangeness, of the electric and eclectic moments of happenstance, and also of extreme ambition, are slowly being removed by code as a path to a new contentment. We are using the acceleration of information transmission to decelerate changes in our physical world.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“Mark Liszewski, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum (Hershey, Pennsylvania), remarked: “Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it’s Apple versus Android. And instead of customizing their ride, today’s teens customize their phones with covers and apps. You express yourself through your phone, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

“argue that the physical world matters no less today, but we are in denial about its power and relevance. We seek to control it, to hold it steady, and to marginalize it ideologically by worshipping Silicon Valley and elevating the value and power of information. We”
― Tyler Cowen, The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream