We will soon, TED talks promise, travel to the beach in driverless cars, where our artificial blood cells will enable us to stay underwater for hours. But we may prefer the virtual reality we will be able to inhabit thanks to direct brain implants, which will have replaced unfashionable headsets. As change proceeds exponentially, our biggest problem may be adjusting to all the dynamism.
That’s one story. But Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and coauthor of the wonderful blog Marginal Revolution, has another. America is much less dynamic and progressive than most of us imagine. We think we are a start-up nation but new firms have been “declining since the 1980s.” We think we are a mobile nation, but the “interstate migration rate has fallen 51 percent below its 1948 to 1971 average.” We think that we are moving, however slowly, toward racial integration, but the “average black student attends a school that is about 8.3 percent white.” We have been stalled, in many respects, for some time.
In The Complacent Class, Cowen considers the “social roots” of this stagnation. We cannot blame monopolists or white supremacists because, sadly, the “villain is us,” the “growing number of people in our society” who accept or insist upon “resistance to things new, different, or challenging.”
I wish Cowen had skipped the term “complacent class,” because it describes a group that is neither altogether complacent nor exactly a class. It includes wealthy people who correctly “believe their lives are very good,” middle-income people who have dug in, hoping to “hang onto .  .  . a pretty decent life, whatever its stresses,” and low-income people, too disillusioned even to riot. Cowen, in any case, deals mainly with those who are pretty satisfied, who sometimes complain about social evils but lack a “sense of urgency” about them.
After the “rebellion of the 1960s and early 1970s,” Cowen thinks, Americans sought calm and have, to a point, found it in “a lower crime rate, more safety for most of our kids,” and other security gains. Today, not just security but contentment is within reach for many: “Matching” is the fruit of the one grand project of our recent past, the wiring of the world, which enables us to seek just the right music on Spotify, just the right doll on eBay, and just the right mate on Match.com. But matching can be an innovation-suppressing innovation and has “helped to cement in a lot of segregation, stasis, and complacency.” When the savvy and resource-rich find it easy to marry each other, rather than the boy next door, and otherwise find it easier to acquire exactly what they want, “a world of .  .  . stable wealth and satisfied ownership” rather than “perpetual personal churn” emerges. Lives-matching makes it possible, for its best practitioners are good enough to cause a “decline of American restlessness.”
Millennials, Cowen thinks, are mastering this new world. They are good at finding satisfaction in “having some of their niche preferences fulfilled for the sake of their own internally developed happiness.” That is nice for them but bad for progress because millennials have “less interest in grand projects or topping previous records of achievement.”
Cowen predicts a “great reset,” intimations of which may be found in the strange politics of our moment. The quest of the complacent class for greater security and contentment has led them to places like Park Slope and Ann Arbor, whose residents “would be horrified if you pointed it out [the segregation] in their neighborhoods” but find a way (thanks, artisanal cocktails!) to live with it. The country is increasingly characterized by “superclusters of cooperation among the quality cooperators and a fair amount of chaos and dysfunctionality elsewhere.” The complacent class can no longer convince even themselves that we live in a dynamic society that will soon enough lift everyone who merits lifting. But “without a strong ideology and a strong belief in the future, the vacuum can be filled by other, worse ideas.”
Cowen is probably right that American society is less dynamic than most of us think, and he may be right that a great reset is coming. But his story of why we find ourselves here is unconvincing. In particular, Cowen oversells the connection between restlessness and progress. Alexis de Tocqueville, who Cowen thinks may be “the primary theorist for the decline of American restlessness,” helps us see the problem with Cowen’s account. Cowen reads him as fearing that “American restlessness might contain the seeds of its own demise.” Restlessness brings progress, which brings “sluggish satisfaction” and, eventually (in Tocqueville’s words), “brutish indifference about the future.” But that is not how Tocqueville sees it at all. Here is his account.
In aristocratic, immobile ages, nobles, because their taste for well-being is satisfied “without trouble,” are free to apply themselves to “some more difficult and greater undertaking” than securing material goods. As for the people, they become “habituated to poverty” and their thoughts turn to otherworldly goods. The nobles are complacent, in Cowen’s terms, but their complacency is coupled with the capacity to take on grand projects.
In mobile, democratic ages, however, the rich, the poor, and the middling can—and do—turn almost exclusively to a “search for material enjoyments.” Where religion is not in a position to direct their gaze to the future, democratic peoples are “naturally brought to want to realize their least desires without delay.” Under these conditions, one still has the restlessness, indeed the “tumult,” of democracy; but that restlessness distracts us from everything but the present. This dynamic, not a decline in restlessness, could lead (as Tocqueville sees it) to “brutish indifference about the future.” Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis, wherein restlessness is less a pioneer spirit than an attention deficit disorder, contradicts Tyler Cowen’s.
Tocqueville’s analysis also suggests a different picture than Cowen’s of the state of modern souls. Tocqueville found a “singular melancholy” beneath the surface of American dynamism and attributed it to, among other things, the “futility” of the quest for contentment, in which the possession of some goods is no impediment to the imagination of “a thousand others that death will prevent [us] from enjoying if [we do not] hasten.” For this and other reasons, the democratic impulse leaves democratic peoples always restless, and sometimes surprisingly sad.
It would be simplistic to use this age-old account of the quest for contentment to explain our millennials. But I was surprised by Cowen’s account of millennials as uncommonly good at finding internal contentment, an account at odds with other analyses that find them to be at least as materialistic, image-conscious, anxious, and depressed as prior generations. Cowen’s mind is too fertile not to consider the possibility that information technology and matching provide an “illusion of security, stability, and control” rather than actual control over lives still led in the physical world. That the complacent class cannot have, in the long term, the security it seeks is one of Cowen’s main contentions. But even in the short term, millennials, “the finest product” of the complacent class, may well be, for better or for worse, as restless as their predecessors.
Jonathan Marks is professor of politics at Ursinus College.
