A Thought-Provoking Study of the American Dream's Promise

Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream is a thought-provoking examination of what the American Dream is and how people reach it, using economic and sociological data in an easily-digested manner to back up assertions.

Although The Complacent Class was an enjoyable read as is, Cowen could have used the same data to reach the same conclusions for a differently-titled book—a flaw that does not detract from the book’s merit, however.

Strongly Presented Arguments

Presenting data boosting both sides of an issue and siding with the favored premise is the hallmark of a strong mind, which Cowen undoubtedly possesses. Packing 191 detailed notes and 228 footnoted references into such a brief and well-written book is no task for all but the most expert writers, and readers will close the back cover more fully informed about the true state of our world today.

Cowen’s premise is controversial: American society has become more prosperous, but also more adverse to changes that may upset the status quo. Because people today are more prosperous, Cowen writes, they are more resistant to ideas that may upset status quo.

“It involves people making decisions that are at first glance in their best interests—that is, they are economically and indeed socially rational decisions,” Cowen writes. “But the effects of these decisions at the societal level are significant, unintended, and not always good. They have made us more risk averse and more set in our ways, more segregated, and they have sapped us of the pioneer spirit that made America the world’s most productive and innovative economy. Furthermore, all this has happened at a time when we may need American dynamism more than ever before.”

Self-Sorting As Social Ill?

Cowen claims American culture is becoming balkanized and coming apart, writing people have stopped seeking out new experiences and new people, but I feel this point isn’t backed up by the data he chooses to support his diagnosis for the body politic’s symptoms.

Even though I reject this hypothesis—as well as his use of the arguably pejorative term “segregation” to describe this trend of self-sorting into homogenous neighborhoods—there is much to like about The Complacent Class.

Indeed, there’s so many positive trends identified by The Complacent Class that one can argue that Americans may not become complacent and risk-adverse as Cowen claims.

For example, when arguing that how people use technological advances, such as Google or Facebook, exemplifies how people use technology to just watch others’ interesting lives instead of living their own life, Cowen ignores that these services didn’t exist until only recently. Such “matching” must be benefitting people’s lives by connecting them with what they seek, even if contentment with homogeneity is the goal.

Connecting People With Things

Improving accuracy of matching consumers’ wants with services and products is leading to more complacency and less searching, Cowen writes.

“Even when we do get a big breakthrough, its impact is not in every way revolutionary. Paradoxically, Americans can use innovative, ever more efficient information technology to slow down the change in many parts of life and to become more rather than less settled. … Spotify and Pandora match our taste in music. Software matches college roommates. LinkedIn matches executives and employees. Facebook helps us reconnect to our past—our old neighbors, our old boyfriends—and more generally even brings us to just the right news and advertisements, or at least what we think is just right.”

Studying The American Spirit

The Complacent Class may prove challenging to readers, because Cowen presents an argument with which they may disagree, but still be enlightened by reading nonetheless.

For example, Cowen cites the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat and author of Democracy in America in the 19th century. Cowen seizes on de Tocqueville’s observations of Americans in situ as identifying “restlessness”—striving for different, more and better—as what sparked the flame of American democracy. 

“If there is any primary theorist for the decline of American restlessness, it is Tocqueville, who understood that a static America might in the longer run have trouble maintaining the democratic spirit of the country and that an ongoing stasis was not the same as perpetual stability,” Cowen writes. “Whatever his fears for the future, Tocqueville’s basic portrait of the United States was of a land perpetually in motion. Democracy in America details a nation in ferment, in the process of becoming, and full of energy and ambition. Tocqueville noted that Americans were far more restless than the English, and furthermore this restlessness came from a great awareness of what they always were lacking.”

A Warning Against Complacency

As with many of The Complacent Class’ other claims, I disagree that American culture has become stagnant, but concede that the idea has merit, if only as a thought exercise and warning.

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream is filled with facts and references, and readers are encouraged to read it fully and consider its challenging hypotheses with an open mind, even if one disagrees with the long-term predictions Cowen makes, as I did.