The Complacent Class

“And we're here to talk about Tyler's new book, The Complacent Class. And the subhead is the self-defeating quest for the American dream. I think the best way to kind of kick it off, Tyler, is if you could tell us what is the primary thesis of your book?”

“But yet you argue in your book that technology is actually a driver for some of that complacency. That in fact some of the very algorithms that we use for matching, for instance, are help helping to create this.”

“Well, one of the lines in your book that really stood out to me, and I put a question mark with an exclamation point next to it, is we are using the acceleration of information transmission to decelerate changes in our physical world.”

“So, in your book, you talk about the three different subtypes of complacency or complacent classes. There was the privileged group. Yes. And I kind of think of them as just being much more rooted in the status quo because if you are privileged and that was part of the status quo, anything that repudiates that is bad.”

“But in your book, you say like NIMBY's just one specific physical manifestation of a broader mentality of stasis. There's also NIMEY, which is not in my election year, NIMTOO, not in my term of office, very relevant today on the day of the inauguration.”

“We had Joel Mokyr on this podcast and when he described the culture in the Republic of Letters and all these factors that contributed to the Industrial Revolution, the thought that kept pointing in my head over and over and over again was like, this is China. This is China. This is China.”

“Well, the phrase in the book which I think describes this perfectly at both an individual, generational, company, political, geographic level is a sense of urgency.”

“Is that what you mean when you describe in your book the great reset? great reset. That the old way at some point you cannot continue with, and you do get new dynamism and new technologies that really fundamentally change things, and in the very long run are great for your country, but you have significant numbers of decades where”

“So, on this note, Tyler, in the book, you make the argument cuz one of the things about the Wikipedia and GDP argument that Mokyr made on the podcast, we've talked about this in numerous forums, that free is actually the wrong argument and that it's things are really not free, which I found very counterintuitive when I saw that”

“In your book, Tyler, you wrote this line that Americans are outsourcing their mobility and capacity for economic adjustment. And I thought that was so interesting. We move across state lines much less than we used to compared to the postwar era. And one reason for that is just most parts of the country, economically speaking, they're more like each”

“And the idea of not having to have necessarily all your wealth tied up into your home, which by the way, is another thing you talk about in your book. This fact that because people have so much wealth tied up in their homes, they're not buying cars in the same way, they're not, you know, moving out of their”

“one way of reading tyler accounts complacent class is basically just a way of like our preference we've just our preferences for optionality have grown a lot”

“So you wrote a book in 2017 called the complacent class and in it you predicted a great reset. You wrote quote at some point our country will face an immediate crisis and there won't be the resources or more fundamentally the flexibility to handle it.”

“In the complacent class, you predicted that um, after the great reset, uh, dynamism would be with us again. Are you predicting that we'll be dynamic again after the following this crisis?”

“And um let's talk about your more most recent book business. Now I think I um also see a contradiction between the complacent class and big business. Big business almost reads like a love letter to the complacent class.”

“So, I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts on on that especially in the context of one of the themes you talk about in your book, Tyler, about segregation. And this is like the reverse before it would be like a closed enclave and now we're looking at exposure across communities.”

“Tyler wrote the great stagnation his new book is it's I think it's called the complacent culture and it's the cultural side of this argument which I know Peter also believes”

“I'd like to ask you about one of your many books the complacent class”