*The Complacent Class* with Katherine Mangu-Ward (Live at Mason)

Hi everyone, this is Jeff. Today we're bringing you a bonus episode featuring audio from a Mercatus event last week with Tyler Cowen and Katherine Mangu-Ward, who's the editor-in-chief at Reason. It's a discussion of Tyler's book, The Complacent Class. It was a fun night. You'll definitely want to listen in for the part Katherine describes as being peak Tyler, but there's plenty of other good stuff in there too. In other Complacent Class news, Thanks to all of you who rated and reviewed us on iTunes. The podcast has really taken off in the last few months. Your ratings have been a big part of that. I don't have any more free books to give away, but please keep spreading the word. It helps a lot. So enjoy this audio from the Complacent Class event, and we'll be back on Wednesday with our next episode featuring Malcolm Gladwell.

Thank you, Dan, and thank you very much to you all for coming here to be vaguely insulted by Tyler, which is, you know, it is an honor, and you were right to come in for that. So Tyler, maybe before we get started, could you talk a little bit about the series of books that you seem to be writing, which are sort of, well, frankly, which are frequently insults to the people in this room, or that sort of raise concerns about where we find ourselves politically, socially, economically that you frequently don't hear elsewhere? What sent you down this road that ends with The Complacent Class, or maybe the middle of the road is only The Complacent Class?

I think of Complacent Class as part of a trilogy that I started with The Great Stagnation. And the core question that's driving the work is what has gone wrong in American life? So if you look at many different indicators, since 1999, whether it's social indicators for lower-income people, real wages, which for most Americans have been falling, actually, apart from the top few percent, America's standing in the world. In the 1990s, there was such a popular, I would say, myth of progress that there would be 3% growth in productivity, middle-class wages would go up every year, and almost every country in the world but North Korea would become more free. And we've learned that's not how it works. So how does it work? And this piece of the installment is about how we as Americans are seeking more security and more safety. And this is good for us individually. It's often rational. So we don't let our kids play outside. We medicate ourselves at higher rates. We move across state lines less often. Our rates of productivity growth and innovation, even our rates of startups are down. So individually it may be good for us, but collectively actually it spells trouble. That's like my elevator speech. And by the way, I'm used to interviewing people in this room.

I know.

It's your turn.

The tables have turned.

Yeah.

Just wait. I'm taking my revenge on behalf of anyone who you put in a tight spot, I hope. So one of the sort of themes in the book, I would say, is your cell phone, your, your kind of, your online life versus life in the physical world, and in particular, your car. And I sort of see those two technologies as being somewhat juxtaposed in the eras that they come from and the kind of world that they represent. So that takes us to our first poll question, which is, if you had to choose, would you be most willing to give up your car or your cell phone? And you all can vote on this question. We'll see what you say via text. Now, of course, you cannot vote with your car. So do your best there. And while people are throwing their answers up on the board, Tyler, I wonder if— is that fair to say that it's an either/or? Or how do we even get to a place where those things seem to be in opposition?

If someone crashed their car through that wall right now over here, I would want Julie to count that as one vote for the car.

I agree. I agree to your terms.

But the rates at which 17- or 18-year-olds get driver's licenses, they're down significantly. And this is a change, say, from the 1970s, even though we're wealthier today. And some of it's urbanization, but I don't think that's the main reason. Young people live at home for longer periods of time. Some of their ambitions are stifled. By student debt. But I think of physical space as what actually rules the world. Where you live, who are your friends, what is your commute like, what's the geography and topography of your country— that's the real stuff. And on top of that, we've built this almost world of illusion in information space, where we move that information around at quicker and quicker speeds. And it does something for us, or we wouldn't do it. But I think we're in denial about how much in physical space we're moving backwards. We still fly planes from 1970. Most commutes have gotten longer. Trains have not gotten better in this country. Bus lines, if anything, have been dismantled. Fewer young people are wanting to drive. So I think there's a point in our history in the future where physical space will reassert itself, is the way I see it. And will brush away the epiphenomena of all that information.

This is sort of in contrast to what I think of as the, uh, Golden Age of science fiction vision in which we become increasingly detached from physical space, that we live in virtual worlds, that we communicate virtually, maybe that we live on our own planets or solar systems. Uh, what do you think people were missing from that era? Why did that look like a glorious future and now it looks less glorious to you?

Well, there are different golden ages of science fiction. If you read most science fiction from, say, the 19th century up until maybe the 1970s, it typically is under-predicting how much things will change. When you read science fiction since then, more often than not, it's a dystopia. It predicts decay, which may or may not happen. And the idea that people are manipulating the physical building blocks of the universe That seems to appear less frequently. So it is, in each case, reflecting its time. But early science fiction, it does underestimate how much power we have over information. You read Asimov's I, Robot, and even by like 2020, a computer, you know, it still takes up a room this big. Even though we can do all kinds of other neat things like have amazing robots. Somehow you can have a brilliant robot, but the computer itself is in a room this big. That doesn't make sense.

I wonder if you could talk about the idea that, and maybe you would say this is just an outdated idea, but people who see smartphones, tablets, and general connectivity as the means of production, essentially, right? You have people like Marc Andreessen who are saying, you know, if you put the means of production in the form of tablets and internet access into the hands of an additional billion people, say, how could that not unleash widespread global productivity, creativity, and human potential? What is he missing? Or maybe, as you say it in your book, are pessimists undervaluing tech innovations? How does that not— how is Marc Andreessen wrong?

I had a debate with Marc Andreessen lately. And I'm not sure it's proper for me to speak for him, but as I interpreted him, he has come around to the more pessimistic view that enough things have gone wrong and the gains in the speed and quality of information transmission now appear so relatively trivial compared to the actual problems of the world. And there have been estimates— how much are we underestimating the productivity gains from, say, Facebook and internet connections. Keep in mind, we pay for those things. They are in GDP. You pay for your smartphone. So there is consumer surplus from Facebook. I'm not sure it's higher than the consumer surplus from TV in 1972. And when you make all the adjustments for undervaluation of the internet, at least two-thirds of the productivity crisis, at least, seems to still be there.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about robot panic while we're talking Asimov and the ways in which our anxiety about the future and maybe the ways in which our complacency manifest in the conversation about automation and robotics generally, or artificial intelligence if you want to lump it in there.

In the back room before we started, we were talking about why sex robots have not come yet. And how we know this. And it was my hypothesis that if they were actually here, I would hear about them so often that I wouldn't have to ask, "Are sex robots here yet?" That if you have to ask, you know they're not. But I take an intermediate position on robots and automation. I think it will be a real issue. I don't think it is a huge amount yet. But I think it will be like the Industrial Revolution.— and this is often the libertarian citation to convince people it won't be that bad. Like, "Oh, this has all happened before. People moved out of agriculture into all these other sectors." That's true, but think what a mess the Industrial Revolution was. Depending whose estimates you believe, but arguably, English real wages might not have gone up for 60 or 70 years running. Does that sound a tiny bit familiar? We got Marxism from the Industrial Revolution. So, one can call that irrational or a mistake. But when there's volatility, people will latch on to some non-optimal ideas. So I think in a funny way, because of contemporary politics, the pessimists are winning a lot of these debates, whether or not they deserve to. It's just harder in the metropolitan area bubbles to say nothing is wrong. I mean, people were saying that as recently as October, early November. But now, for reasons which I think are actually intellectually unfair, Even though I think they're right, the pessimists are winning most of these debates.

So since you started it, and I want it noted that he started it, let's talk—

I didn't mention the name.

Yeah, it doesn't—

it's like you can't— I know you prefer he who must not be named, but let's talk Trump for a minute. You finished this book before the election, and then I think you told me managed to sneak in a few edits once we knew the outcome.

That's right.

And you might say that you saw Trump coming but didn't see him coming quite so fast.

That's also right.

What do you think it means that Trump is now here for your thesis particularly?

That there's a kind of institutional rot in this country, and I'm not identifying the rot with Trump. I'm saying Trump is a symptom of the rot. Trump is not the rot. That's a huge mistake to make. Even if you're against Trump, if you think he is the rot, I think you're very badly misled. There's something about our current mix of polarization and the feeling almost everyone has that they've lost control, and politics becoming more of a fight over a fixed pie that will lead to declines in the quality of governance at some point, with or without Trump. So he is a symptom. Uh, if your emphasis is on getting rid of the symptom, I think that's not looking deep enough. The fundamental problem, I think, is a zero-sum politics plus more geographic clustering— Democrats in particular being so keen to live next to each other— uh, the culture war really flaring up over issues of what kind of America is this and who has the right to say what. And that all just seems to be getting worse. And, you know, instinctively I feel if because of the internet and everything else, if productivity were actually growing at 3% a year, we wouldn't have any of this. And indeed we didn't in 1996.

Let's talk a little bit about immigration. You sort of posit a role for immigrants here both as engines of dynamism, but possibly— and you'll sell me that this is an unfair characterization— suboptimal engines of dynamism in some ways, at least from the perspective of American culture. What do you think that— what is the implication there both in terms of our current kind of national rethinking about what our immigration policy is or should be, and also whether a dramatic decrease in immigration would change the dynamics for dynamism?

Well, today I usually think of immigrants as a whole as the one group of Americans who are the least complacent. They are not the complacent class. There are even some findings from social psychology that suggest immigrants may be more neurotic than average, more driven, sort of stranger, having a strange time horizon where they care about the very distant future and the lives of their children and grandchildren. They care about the immediate annoyances of the present that forced them to leave where they once lived. But that intermediate 20 or 30-year period where they're doing incredible adjustments, very painful,— you know, starting all over, losing your status markers. Somehow they get over that. So a very strange discount function. But I think the problem is immigrants, Silicon Valley, and some of these super-productive native-born Americans have created a new America pretty rapidly. And it's other people, often lower skilled, who cannot assimilate into that. That's the actual assimilation problem. The immigrants, in a sense, assimilate so, so, so rapidly into some notion of the slightly earlier America. It's many of the rest of us who are having trouble assimilating, not so much in Northern Virginia, but in the country as a whole.

Talk about mobility for native-born Americans. That was a piece of this book that I, I found particularly interesting, was, you know, we're sort of having this national obsession right now with the idea of income mobility and whether people are moving between classes, but you tie that idea to to physical mobility, to the willingness to sort of pick up stakes and go. And you actually say— you ask readers to ask themselves, if your family had been in America for a few generations and you are ambitious, are you really considering moving to a region of the country with very few immigrants? How about West Virginia or Eastern Kentucky? Probably not. And the fact that you would be so confident in your readers' lack of interest in moving to Eastern Kentucky as to sass them in that way in print, speaks a lot to the ethic of, you know, staying in place that is, I think, increasingly dominant in America. Immigrants can't do all the moving around for us, but why have Americans stopped moving around?

Just as an aside, I'll first note I've been doing a lot of media for this book, maybe 30 different outlets, not picked by me, you know, picked by them. We've reached out to everyone. But with possibly one exception, all of those 30 are what you would call, like, coastal bubble media sources, that I can write a sentence like that and they react the way you do. They're not like, "Huh, I live in Eastern Kentucky, where everyone wants to come here." No one has had that response. But, I mean, here's what the data say. Moving across state is now about 50% lower than it was during the period 1948 to 1971. And some of that is age, but even age-adjusted, it's much lower. And the main factor seems to be there's less of an economic reason to move, say, to Detroit or then to Houston. You have more service sector jobs. The notion that a dentist in Columbus, Ohio picks up and moves to Denver because that's where the teeth are, it's just not that big a force. And also, with cheaper travel, people are used to flying, and there's the internet. You can figure out earlier in your life where you want to live, which of course is Fairfax, Virginia, we all know. And then you camp out there for 27 years, as I've done. Not that I'm complacent. I took that quiz, you know. And that's, you know, we're surrendering to physical space. And even within where you live, the likelihood that you can stay at home and order out and get Uber to bring your food Amazon to bring your books, the internet to bring your entertainment, and Netflix streaming to choose which great movies you have a chance of watching and which not. That is contemporary innovation, staying at home.

I'm just really for it. Like, I just love staying at home. But that's why I also took the complacency quiz and got like an embarrassing score. So really quickly, let's do our own quiz.

I am embarrassed.

I—

Because it's self-interesting.

Right. Well, but I actually think that does— sorry, first we'll do the quiz and then I'll be embarrassed. So next question, in the last 5 years, how many different states have you lived in? Answer up on the board, team. No, I actually— let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, the idea that you would simultaneously do all of these interviews where no one would be even remotely bothered by the idea that of course no one wants to live in Eastern Kentucky, and at the same time that we should feel dimly ashamed of the idea of sitting on our sofa and having, you know, robots and low-wage workers bring us all of our goods. What's at work there?

There's something about how media treats books. So media outlets that might take what you would call broadly a more, you know, Trumpian perspective, they do cover books, but they cover different kinds of books. They're probably more likely to cover, you know, Bill O'Reilly's biography of Jesus than say the media outlets I've been talking to.

Is that a real book?

A real book. It's one of the best-selling books of the last few years. You know how it ends, right? But I think that, you know, the big sort in this country has gone far enough where if you're living in Washington, New York— on one radio show, the comparison was Arlington, Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Santa Monica. They're all more alike than they used to be. And I've gone to all of those over a course of years multiple times. And you know, a big part of this book, it's actually me making fun of me. So I always put the little Straussian digs into books. So the dedication of this book To the rebel in all of us. And maybe a little bit I'm making fun of you, but mostly I'm making fun of me. The rebel? Writing a book is not that rebellious a thing to do. Not for St. Martin's Press, right? You know, I could have thrown a Molotov cocktail with "The Complacent Class" written on the cloth or something. But there's a way in which, you know, we try to come to terms with how our own lives have evolved. And partly, this book is that. This is a very complacent response to complacency. And in the writing of the book, I'm making fun of myself.

Non-complacent responses to complacency, though, end in fires. I mean, you know, I think— I guess what I'm asking is, are you not also complacent about the virtues of complacency. And of course, you address that in the book. But there's a sort of— toward the end when you say, well, there's a lack of a kind of strong positive vision for the future that's driving us or a loss of faith in the American experiment or whatever. As I was reading those passages, I immediately just have wild-eyed Marxists in my mind, or at least crazy hippies. And so I guess what I'm wondering is, You know, you're joking about your own complacent response to complacency, but isn't that the best response? But of course you would say that, wouldn't you?

You know, it depends how I did on that quiz, and I'm not going to tell you. It really would be best if we could maintain complacency, but I think we've reached the point where a lot of people are now realizing that's not possible. So there are different attempts to explain the decline in the quality of our governance. Like, oh, it was all an accident. Or, you know, something intervened with the election. But I think those are missing the point. It got as far as it did in any case. And it's best understood as an endogenous response to the way things used to be not working anymore. So I would love if we could just keep on being complacent. I sometimes say, you know, Mediocrity is what's underrated. It's pretty excellent. But insofar as we end up losing control, I think it will actually have been the complacency of, say, the two previous decades that will largely be at fault. Not that I want to get rid of it.

That was like Oscar Wilde as an economist right there, the mediocrity's underrated line. Let's talk about some of your scenarios for a more dynamic and chaotic future, because I thought, you gave us this kind of list of bullet points at the end of the book, and I was like, Tyler, here's book 4. Like, keep going. In particular, I think the idea that African immigrants might be a source of dynamism was something that I would— I just wanted to hear you talk more about.

African immigrants who come to the United States, they have higher rates of finishing college than native-born Americans. And they've done fairly well. And I think if you look at Africa as a very populous continent and a continent also that is generally not that well run, serious governance problems, whether countries want it or not, immigration from Africa will be one of the biggest issues. I wouldn't even say of the future, I'd say especially in Europe, it's a huge issue right now. So there's a way we can do it. Where it will work well, and it's my hope we do that. And I think African and also Chinese in-migration already have had significant impacts on this country, but I think those are big stories looking forward.

Before I came in here, Bryan Kaplan slipped me a $20 to ask you about how people should have more children and whether that— how that might come about.

Well, they should. We don't really know what it's like to have many decades of an advanced society of wealth with a shrinking aging population. What we see from Japan, which I think is working fairly well for Japan, which is one of the most highly ordered societies, but I don't think it's encouraging. I think Japan is cooperative and orderly enough and has managed its expectations very well. There's still a high quality of life there. I don't feel this country could manage the same kind of transition to just ongoing shrinkage. So this is one case where we already know the technology for solving the problem, right? We just have to do it. And I don't mean with the robots. So we need to tax the sex robots. And in hidden, non-transparent ways, increase birth subsidies, I would say. I mean, that's what I would favor, because I think the alternative is a political economy that a country whose founding story is growth will not be able to handle.

The other one in here which I, you know, I think could be a controversial part of this book was your pointing to the widespread antidepressant use as a contributing factor to our complacency. On some level, of course, that's obvious. You could imagine people might become more complacent when they take drugs that help them be happier with their situation in life. Again, I guess I would— I'd be interested to just hear you talk about how the upsides don't outweigh the downsides or vice versa. And of course, it's individual versus society in many cases, but you posit that there could easily be a scenario in which antidepressants fall out of favor and are replaced by alternative medical processes that address the problems of depression without tranquilizing Americans.

Let me give you a time machine and send you back to Vincent van Gogh.

I have a lot of things I need to fix.

And you have some antidepressants to make him better. What actually would you do, should you do, could you do? I mean, we really don't know. Maybe he would have had a much longer life and produced more wonderful paintings. But I worry about the answer to that question. And I think in general, for all the talk about diversity, we're grossly undervaluing actual human diversity and actual diversity of opinion and ways in which people, which are not generally— they can be racial or ethnic, but they don't have to be at all— ways in which people are actually diverse and obliterating them somewhat. And this is, you know, my Tocquevillean worry. And I think we've engaged in this massive social experiment of a lot more antidepressants, and I think we don't know what the consequences are. I'm not saying people shouldn't do it. I'm not trying to offer any kind of advice or lecture. I'm just saying from a social—

This is not official medical opinion. Talk to your doctor about it.

From a social point of view, There were a few books, you know, talking back to Prozac. Big debate at the time. Then we lost interest in that debate. Somehow we decided we weren't gonna argue anymore about being complacent.

How can we create a sense of urgency without creating a sense of panic? Do those things necessarily come together?

The word necessarily makes me hesitate. We're not able to right now. And all these radio hosts ask me, "Well, how do we get out of this? What's your cure? What's your fix?" And I have a list of things I would do, which are pretty close to what you can read about in Reason Magazine. But I don't think that's the answer to the right question. I think the right question is, why have people lost interest so much in doing or even seriously debating these options? And that, I think, is ultimately a psychological question. And I don't think we will recapture the urgency until it bites us in the bum, and we will have to, to solve pressing problems which at this moment are not really yet on our doorstep.

One of the things that you could of course read about every month in Reason Magazine is the current state of the federal budget, and you talk about this in the book a little bit, in particular the fact that so much of our government spending is pre-programmed, that it's it's not something where even shifting political winds can make much of a dent. Um, is that— would you rate that one of the more fixable or less fixable, uh, conditions of our complacency? Because I myself go back and forth on whether that's a solvable problem.

I don't think that's a solvable problem. So as of 2020, by some estimates, the parts of the budget on automatic pilot basically the parts that make our government a giant insurance company. You didn't know you live next door to Allstate, did you? Uh, they'll be 80% of the budget. And even in President Obama's late budgets, discretionary spending in real terms was slated to decline. In terms of our willingness to invest in our future, there's different judgments on infrastructure. When the engineers issue that report card, I think they're exaggerating. The decline, but overall I don't feel it's impressive in the way that a lot of our country's other achievements are. And I think we've simply decided we're gonna spend almost all of our money making ourselves safe, and we'll end up making ourselves much, much less safe because of that decision.

We even borrow some of the language of previous government ventures that were high-risk to describe things that we're now doing to make ourselves safer, right? We have the cancer moonshot. That's probably the one that comes to mind. Do you think there's a gap between the rhetoric and the reality here? I mean, I do think we are frequently talking about a Manhattan Project for this or a moonshot for that, or, you know, we're sort of eager to talk about the things that we do either as governments or as corporations in rather grand language. When the gains are to safety, efficiency, and comfort.

When we cut past all the rhetoric, I think in the last 15, 20 years we have actually had two grand projects. So earlier grand projects: atomic energy, interstate highways, winning World War II, winning the Cold War. They were big deals. We've had two. One is tying together all human beings with cell phones and smartphones and the internet. And that's been a smashing— I hesitate to say success because maybe the effects are mixed, but in terms of how well we did it and how quickly, it's been an incredible success. And even with the regulation being so complicated, we actually didn't screw it up. Like, your cable and cell phone bills could be lower with a bit better system, but still, it's what we have more or less works. The other was the war in Iraq, which obviously was a complete non-success. That was a grand project, the notion that, you know, we can in some way remake the Middle East. Now whether you think it had no chance or we chose, you know, a non-complacent project for our complacent people, whatever your take is, I would say clearly a total failure, very destructive. So we have this one information-based grand project. I'm not sure what's next. It depresses me When I hear like the Democratic platform, I don't mean this in any kind of partisan way, but it seems to me like if I were more of that point of view, it would all sound so small to me. And I think that's one reason why the other you-know-who lost. None of it was that exciting, and then the focus was on personality, emails, other, you know, issues. And so you have one candidate, make America great again, Another talking about the successes of the '90s. Both of them, you know, two of the oldest candidates we've had in a long time, if not ever, and hearkening back to the past. And, you know, I didn't see a lot of really forward-looking ideas. When Trump talks about rebuilding America, it's fixing tunnels and bridges. That's like a 1930s idea. It's not even a '70s idea. You don't hear about the smart grid. It's about fixing tunnels and bridges. So very depressing.

Do we not hear about the smart grid because the American people could never figure out what the smart grid was and whether they were supposed to be for it?

Well, many of them are for smart.

I'm not sure they're for grid. That's a good point.

But the ones who are for smart, maybe you could try explaining to them what the smart grid is, because they're for smart. You just have to sell them on grid. Tyler Cowen.

Right, so we're halfway there.

Great.

So did you write this book about how Americans are complacent and maybe our best days are behind us because you're old and grumpy?

I don't think I'm grumpy. I actually take this to be a pretty optimistic book. It doesn't sound optimistic because it's saying the bumps are right before us now. Get ready for some real pain and volatility, right? That's not optimistic. But the book is also taking a broader perspective. You look at American history as a whole and think about, like, what was the quality of government actually like in our very earliest years? It was terrible. What were things like during and immediately after the Civil War? Or during the presidency of Andrew Jackson? Or during the Great Depression? Or Richard M. Nixon, or the riots and violence of the 1960s. And we got through all those things to some wonderful complacency. So in a funny way, I'm actually calling for a new next generation of complacency and saying it's gonna be good, and telling people to hold on, don't let the bumps freak you out. Like, we've been through this before. We've seen this movie. And if either you're relatively young, or maybe you came to this country as an immigrant, and all you've seen were the '80s and '90s and parts of the '00s, maybe short of the crisis, what's going on now will feel so strange and out of character to you, like, "Where's the America I knew and loved?" But I think that's completely wrong. This is America. The things you don't like about today, the bumps we're about to hit, that's much more typical. The '80s and '90s are these weird outlier decades. So, I'm actually a confirmed optimist. But in a strange, perverse way.

Yeah, I like it that you want to corner the market on optimism and pessimism simultaneously. It's quite clever, actually. So for people who are not annoying radio hosts that want you to solve the problem, but instead are just interested observers of the problem as it is happening right now, What story did you read in a newspaper this week that made you feel once again that your thesis was correct?

Well, there's a new book out called Jack and Henry. It's about Jack Henry Abbott and, uh, Jack and Norman. Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott. Norman Mailer, of course, the famous writer, who was himself a violent fellow. And in 1981, he arranged for the release of a violent convict named Jack Henry Abbott. And a few months after Jack Henry Abbott was released, he stabbed someone in a pizza parlor because they wouldn't let him use the men's room. And if you read Jack Henry Abbott's memoir, which ended up published through the intermediation of Norman Mailer, he was an incredibly violent guy and showed few signs of really having reformed himself. And during this time, he was idolized, not by a majority of Americans, but by a significant cross-section of America, large enough that judges could be convinced to let him out and give him a second chance. Now, whether or not you think that was the correct decision, it's really impossible to imagine this happening today. So that's one newspaper story, and I read the book. The other is, I was reading about Brazil. And pensions in Brazil are a huge chunk of GDP. They're over 12% of GDP. Brazil, not a wealthy country, but it does more to give people pensions relative to where it stands, I believe, than any other country except some of the oil principalities. And you've got to ask yourself the question, Brazil being obsessed with pensions, how safe has that made Brazilians? From crime, from joblessness, from poverty, from volatility? It hasn't. So Brazil is a more extreme case of something we will be going through, an effort to invest as much as they can in safety in a manner that is precisely counterproductive.

I want you all to brace yourselves for the most contrived segue that has ever happened in the history of interviews. Speaking of not being able to use the bathroom in a pizza parlor— Let's talk about Yelp. We have a poll question for you. When you are deciding whether to go someplace new, you check an app like Yelp always, most of the time, sometimes. Did you like that? Pizza parlor bathrooms, you would probably be able to read about it. No one would have to get stabbed. This is why we're so complacent. So talk about the impetus behind this question, which is that we have so many tools that make it so that we are— much more rarely negatively surprised. That might be one way of saying it. They feel like a good thing. It feels awesome to never get stabbed in a pizza parlor and to also go on fewer dates that are disasters. Talk to me about why I should be less enthused.

They are a good thing. I write an online dining guide myself that, you know, a few of you know. But, you know, in the last maybe year, I've actually made a vow, and I've been happy with it. And my vow is, in most, maybe all instances, when I'm looking for a place to eat in a new city or a place I'm visiting, that I won't use the internet. I will rely on meat space alone, go into a neighborhood, walk around, use what I know or think I know, and find somewhere.. And I feel I've done pretty well with that. And again, I'm not saying it's a better method for most people. You know, it probably isn't. But we need to have more people doing that to replenish the stock of knowledge behind what is online. There's a tendency that online knowledge, it's a bit parasitic. And there's more herding. There are more kind of bubbles, more intellectual fads, more like hate waves on Twitter. Social media attacks. So there's something about the virulence, the co-movement, the bubbliness of human opinion that seems to get worse on the internet. And to reclaim some of our reality, we need more people going out there in physical space, turning away from that information, and being real again in a somewhat old-fashioned way. It doesn't mean you have to go out on more bad dates, or if you, you know, if you were single that you would have to. But someone has to.

And someone has to. So do you think that a pizza restaurant that denies bathroom access to murderers is likely to have better or worse pizza than the typical pizza restaurant? Just checking.

Oh, worse pizza, obviously. But the dating point's a very good one, because we're not that far from a future where all of your dates, their quality will be measured in advance. They'll be asked to supply genetic material. And I know these evaluations are not currently that good, but in some future Those who don't supply, the inference will be negative. And you will be quote-unquote perfectly matched. No one will have a second chance. I think it'll be kind of strange, measured meritocratic society that few people will actually be happy with. And that's where we're headed with dating too. Everything about you will be measured. Your credit score, your number of Twitter followers. Google already does this somewhat. I don't actually think it's better past some margin.

I wanna get back to—

We're already married, so we don't have to worry.

Well, but then aren't we gonna regret that we did our marriage in this way before we were so carefully sorted? I mean, you're saying people won't be happy, but I wonder if people will know they're not happy, right? This is—

The first thing my wife did was Google me. We met online. And she looked at my Vita and she saw the word libertarian and she thought it meant liberal, which actually it does.

Smart lady.

And she decided she would date me. So I got lucky. But again—

The algorithms would never have let that happen.

Never would have let it happen. I think there can be too much information in systems of matching is another way to put it.

Do you believe in American exceptionalism?

Absolutely. I'm a strong believer in this. The mix of diversity, energy, history, vision, and size and religiosity of this country gives it something special that I don't see anywhere else in the world able to match.

You mention a couple places in the book about how smaller countries that are parasitic on larger countries—

Right.

Sort of dynamism, and that the erosion of that in the United States is a cost not just to us but to the world. But you also use it as evidence for the fact that models of other countries that Americans frequently point to may not refute your various theses. What's the country that people most often point to to tell you that you're wrong? Like, oh, but Tyler, what about Finland?

Denmark, they have a word. I can never pronounce it properly, but it's H-Y-G-G-E. Hygge. Thank you. Something like that. It doesn't mean exactly complacency, but it's closely tied to complacency. Now, I'm not an expert on Denmark, but I think it's more possible Denmark could stay complacent forever than the United States can. They have other mechanisms of order and have an easier time adjusting to slower growth than, say, this country. So, you know, the degree of complacency a society can afford is going to vary a great deal across different physical locations.

I think we're gonna take some questions from the audience now. You can queue up by the microphones here. I remind you to phrase your question in the form of a question. This is such a smart audience. You guys, I know you can do it. I have faith in you. I will give everyone a trophy if you do it. Short with a question mark at the end. Ready?

Go.

Hi, I'm Rebecca Kraft. I read a good bit of the book, not having a lot of time to get that taken care of, not having an advance copy. Anyhow, one of the trends that I see, having a kid and having to see that child going to get settled, is the issue of real estate costs. And you mentioned, you know, so one of the trends you mentioned is the urban— is the spiraling real estate costs in urban areas being something that, you know, that has become a disincentive to moving there. So— and I didn't see anything in the list of the, you know, what's going to happen in the next 20 years about what might happen to that. That trend of real estate cost imbalance, to put it nicely. What do you think's gonna happen there?

In a later chapter in the book, I say it's probably gonna get worse. So homeowners, real estate owners, they wanna restrict building to keep up the values of their properties. They're a dominant wing political coalition almost everywhere, and I suspect this will spread to Atlanta. Eventually to parts of Texas. And more and more American cities will be, you know, locked up in terms of what it costs to move there and try to be mobile. Now that does not have to be the end of the world. If for every Atlanta that locks up, we have a new Chattanooga as the next rising phoenix, we can live with that. But I'm not sure that our rate of rising phoenixes is going to be as fast as our rate of locking up cities. So far, the rising phoenixes are lagging behind. Next.

My name is James Henretta. I'm a retired historian. And I tried to place your book in a context that I understand. And you may be familiar with the work of the two Schlesingers on cycles of American politics. And what they outline is very similar to your big schema that things reach a certain point of stasis, stagnation, and then you have to have a breakthrough, and they see this happening regularly. So that's one part. The other part I see is a work by Hilaire Belloc that ended in his definition of a servile state where people accept complacency and different ranks in society because of the security that it gives you. So that's where I sort of see your book in intellectual terms. And what I, I guess I want to ask you again, although you may already have answered it, is, is there no way to get out of it in a creative way without having a, a catastrophe? It sounds to me as if you're in sort of a Hegelian philosophical position here, and I wonder if that's one you want to affirm.

Everything you're saying is exactly right. The biggest proximate influence on this book is Tocqueville, but also Hegel. You could even say some ideas in the ancient Greeks, but I read Belloc's Servile State when I was 14, so that's been an influence on me. You know, Schlesinger I view as derivative, but a smart guy. I don't have any kind of rigid cyclical view that, oh, it looks like a sine function and, you know, 17 years after the peak this happens. I just think, you know, we had a view where progress was not quite guaranteed, but viewed as locked in in a certain way. And people are now much more open to the idea that successes contain the roots of our later failures. And I'm trying to flesh out those mechanisms. The fact that these ideas are so old actually should again make us optimistic. We've been through this before. It's not a guarantee we'll get through it again, but it actually suggests that just because we're not used to the pain, it doesn't mean Americans and humanity don't have the capacity to survive it. But a creative way to, like, you know, do the sidestep and, "Haha, fooled you this time!" No, I don't think it's there. And the response to the election of our current president, I feel, has just been more polarization. I have not been a supporter of that individual, but I don't find the response of a lot of the opposition very heartening. It seems to me to suggest we're going to keep on spiraling and it will continue to get worse for a while. Go ahead.

So my name is Tyler Fisher. Insofar as many actions of complacency are good for individuals but bad for society. Does that mean that this complacency is a public good? And if so, what's the implication for solving that collective action problem?

Well, complacency is a private good. A bit more volatility is the public good. And, you know, in my last answer, I guess I'm predicting we're not really gonna get to the optimal level. And the higher volatility will be forced on us in ways we can't control at all. So, I mean, that's where I stand. I was kind of naively optimistic in the '90s. I didn't think everything would go the way I wanted. I just thought we'd have steady growth and the kind of scenarios you read about in the Wall Street Journal op-ed page would more or less come true. And the world would have ever freer trade. And they'd sort of be like what— the magazine The Economist hoped for, but a more libertarian version, and it would be pretty stable. That seems much less likely to me now.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

You talk about racial and socioeconomic segregation growing in recent years in the book, and I was wondering if you can talk about, does that lead to greater complacency, and are there certain groups that benefit from this and certain ones that suffer more than others?

Well, the people who live in the nice neighborhoods, obviously, they're the ones who benefit by keeping out whoever it is they want to keep out. The increase in segregation, as I see it, is mainly driven by income. So it's not about racial animus per se. It's not about— some of it's about education per se, but mostly it's can you afford to buy in this area. And that, as a secondary consequence, will give you in some ways more segregation. Say, by race, which we're seeing. But I don't think it's more racism. And I think it's limiting the possibilities for mobility. There's a lot of evidence from Raj Chetty and others that mixed neighborhoods are better for mobility. We have many fewer mixed neighborhoods. I think mixed neighborhoods are better for your politics. We're seeing now these, like, two Americas. The old joke from the '70s, like, oh, "Richard Nixon can't have won. I didn't know anyone who voted for him." Who was the McGovern supporter who said that?

Pauline Kael.

Yeah, exactly. We're back to that so many years later. So that's not good.

Go ahead.

Hi, Josh Windham.

So it's the end of your life, and you lived a complacent one. Should you regret it?

I think if you've lived an optimal life, there's actually a lot of regret at the end of it. So the best path for a life is not regret minimization. It's something else. And people assume that your deathbed perspective has this unique or special vantage point. But you know, it's when your faculties are at their weakest, your memory of what actually happened is at its worst, you're not responsible for any of it anymore, The core economist prescription, like internalize the externalities, like don't ask me as I'm about to pass away, that guy will say anything. So I hope I'm full of regrets on my deathbed.

Y'all, we just reached peak Tyler Cowen. I don't even— we're gonna take another question, but like why bother, honestly?

So you mentioned ideological diversity and how immigrants are more neurotic and how that can help. On average, they might be, right? But have you considered, like, other forms of neurodiversity and how people who are different in other ways, like autistic people, and how they can help with this complacency? Oh, I have a whole book on that called Age of the Infobore, which I would just recommend for you to read.

Tyler Cowen.

And that's a book about how people who are neurologically diverse are actually our best hope for fighting complacency. Because some of them are in some critical ways much less complacent, and they're just like powered by this incredible automatic motor. And furthermore, they thrive in information society in a way they did not in the old styles associated with physical space. So I'm very much in tune with your message. Read my other book.

And I will say, actually, I read that book, and not to give credence to every joke about libertarians, but it has influenced the way that Reason Magazine does HR. We hire more weirdos, basically.

No comment on Mercado.

And it wasn't like we were super normal to begin with, but actually that is, I mean, you know, it's a solution that's appealing because it's something that's internal to our society already that doesn't require a clever sneaking out from under the question or a, you know, giant influx of immigrants. In theory, the solution is already here, sort of.

You need people who see the world differently, even if it means they don't really know how to work their microwave oven.

Go ahead.

Hey there, Mike Blyley.

I have—

I think that the two most interesting areas in which complacency can manifest itself is in technology and politics. So of my two questions, would you rather answer about technology or politics? Which would you rather talk about?

Bundle them into one question.

What's that?

Bundle them into one question.

Oh, wow. Oh, man.

This isn't going to end well.

Oh, man.

They're two different. I'll talk about technology if that's all right then. The question that I have is that, you know, when I think about complacency as it manifests itself in technology, I'm kind of always drawn to this image regarding the American philosopher Mike Judge in his seminal work, Idiocracy, if you're familiar. You know, or also as in WALL-E, just the big screen that completely removes you from anything that you would have to do or think and kind of roots you to where you are. So my question is, was complacency an abject inevitability with the arc that technology was always going to take, whether that's as extreme as this console that brings you in and gravitates everything of your life, or something like the internet, one of the criticisms that's going on with just Google's seeming direction for the internet, which is that the internet as it exists is always going to only relate to you and really keep each of us in our own individual bubbles.

Yes.

Next. Oh, we don't have anybody there. Next on this side. I'll ask questions. I love moderator tyranny. So we actually are almost out of time, but I'll throw in one last question, which is I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your next book. Can you tell us what's coming next? Is it part 4, or are you on to a new category of problems?

New category of problems. There's something about trilogies, threesomes.

People find the number 3 very reassuring.

They find it reassuring in their complacency. And you know, the middle book in the trilogy was called "Average Is Over." So should I right now write a book, "Average Is Still Over"? "Average Is Back Again"? No, the next book will be a defense of American business against its critics and an honest examination of what American business is good at doing or sometimes not good at doing. Like, when is it crooked? Is the financial sector too large? How much is business ripping us off? What in American business is broken? That will be my next book.

All right, you heard it here first. You probably didn't hear it here first. You probably read it on Tyler's blog first. Oh, really? This is breaking news?

Breaking news.

All right, so now you know.

You're the first two have asked.

Oh, see? You can get the current book for sale in the foyer. You can also, I think we're having a book signing. Is this true? So you can get the John Hancock of Tyler on whatever surface you would like. Thank you.

I wouldn't put it that way.

No?

OK. On a very narrow set of surfaces made exclusively Or exclusively of dead trees.

Somewhere in between.

Yeah.

Thank you very much for coming, and thank you for your excellent questions.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.