“The Complacent Class” by Tyler Cowen

Cowen contends that today Americans are more content to hold onto their gains, rather than push for major disruption and churn in their lives. As always, he backs this up with some compelling statistics. “During an eighteen-month period in 1971-1972, there were more than 2,500 domestic bombings reported.” Leave aside whether or not that was a good thing and the cherry-picking of timespan, this is, nonetheless, an amazing fact. That’s about five bombings a day for over a year on American soil. Can one imagine living in that type of destructive America today? Never mind the bombers’ motivations. What would be the response of the citizenry and government to that type of sustained anarchy today? More mundanely, “the interstate migration rate has fallen 51 percent below its 1948 to 1971 average and has been falling steadily since the 1980s…. Only about half of the Millennial Generation bothers to get a driver’s license by age eighteen; in 1983, the share of seventeen-year-olds with a license was 69 percent…. The federal budget is on auto-pilot, with only about 20 percent available to be freely allocated, and that number is slated to fall to 10 percent by 2022…. 61 percent of all private sector financial liabilities are guaranteed by the federal government, either explicitly or implicitly. As recent as 1999, this figure was below 50 percent…. In the 1950s, only about 5 percent of workers required a government-issued license to do their jobs, but by 2008, that figure had risen to about 29 percent…. Today, over 80 percent of the value of the S&P 500 is due to intangible assets, including trademarks, patents, brand name reputation, consumer goodwill, and other factors…. Start-ups were 12 to 13 percent of the firms in the economy in the 1980s, but today they are only about 7 to 8 percent…. [Adjusting] for increases in the American working-age population, the United States creates 25 percent fewer triadic patents [US, Europe, and Japan] per person than it did in 1999…. [and] in the late 1980s, 18.9 percent of the employment in the American economy was at firms five years or younger. This average has fallen to 13.5 percent right before the Great Recession; in numerical terms, that is a 29 percent decline over only seventeen years.” These are just a few of the myriad of facts I found compelling, together forming the larger picture that the America of today is a nation content to play it safe. America seems like a country stuck in a rut, scared to move forward. Between NIMBYism (not in my backyard), political gridlock, aging demographics, anti-immigrant attitudes, and increased government regulations the reasons for this stasis spans all walks of American society. We may not like where we are at exactly, but we are unconfident and afraid to change our patterns of life to truly affect change. Even globally, America has become known as a safe-haven to park wealth [in stocks, bonds, and real estate], not as a dynamic economy known for creating it. But, of course, America cannot just stand still and the longer we postpone the day of reckoning the more dramatic the consequences to come.