Reddit Reddit reviews The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

We found 6 Reddit comments about The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
St Martin s Press
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6 Reddit comments about The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream:

u/brasslizzard · 15 pointsr/collapse

Thank you for this.

  1. Your story about working with fossil fuel companies reminded me of this recent quote: "Partnering with Putin on a "Cyber Security Unit" is akin to partnering with Assad on a "Chemical Weapons Unit". But when it comes to climate change, it's cool, right?

  2. That's an interesting perspective on the death of creativity when it comes to solutions. I remember watching a documentary of Limits to Growth and one of the people on the team was like, "We thought everybody would be super excited to solve this problem because at that time it was still possible to fix things."

    I don't think people really put together how neo-liberalism and globalization hinder creativity and innovation. Many people believe that innovation (particularly private innovation) a la Silicon Valley will save us. But we are actually in an innovation crisis and R&D has been defunded and declining over the past decade. In America, we have probably never been less innovative than we are right now. David Brooks' most recent column has at least part of the puzzle right. See Also The Complacent Class

  3. The last part of what you wrote made me think about the protesters right now who are pushing back against the health care repeal. Congresspeople are nervous. Townhalls are full. Arrests every day in DC and in home districts.

    I think you make a good case that the public, the people, the masses are the only way this is going to change, in any way. It's not going to come from vested interests.

    I am pretty die-hard apathetic when it comes to doing something about climate change. But your post made me feel the slightest flutter of feeling I've felt in a while. Climate change is the only issue that matters. At all. It trumps all other issues because it is truly existential.
u/megamonocle · 11 pointsr/slatestarcodex

Tyler Cowen's book might be of interest to you if you have't already read it:

https://www.amazon.com/Complacent-Class-Self-Defeating-Quest-American/dp/1250108691

u/combinat · 5 pointsr/GetMotivated

Related book by the economist Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250108691/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_iJcRzb4WQ62VX

u/nickel2 · 5 pointsr/slatestarcodex

> High-skilled 2nd-gen immigrants are indistinguishable from native blue tribers.

Sure... if you know New Haven and you see that comment about "sketchy crowds" you might guess she's prejudiced against more than "white trash."

>Okay, but at this point, what's the difference between your position and plain racism? Like, you're not demonstrating any evidence for this position (like the HBD folks do), you're not admitting other races are superior to whites (East Asians), you're just saying other ethnicities are probably evil when they aren't dumb. Or at least, that's what it sounds like to me.

I'm OK with being called racist. At this point it's clear to me that blue-tribers consider that to be the worst non-violent crime, worse than lying or cheating. Not so for me. A little prejudice is adaptive. That's why it's so common.

Of course they don't have (incontrovertible) evidence for their position, nobody's gonna get funding for that kind of thing these days (GWAS results will bring this whole argument crashing down in less than a decade). BTW I don't really read any of them besides Cochran-Harpending as those two are the only people of this time who actually know what they're talking about and are willing to write about it. Stephen Hsu too though he only writes esoterically and rarely gets into technical details on any topic. Emil Kirkegaard is decent too though not nearly as sharp or credentialed as Cochran. The co-authors of this essay are competent as well (from the GxE research I've seen by some of them) and clearly have some balls to throw out even the more haphazard hypotheses in public.

There are plenty of studies showing correlations between Euro ancestry (in Latin America, African-Americans, other places) and various life outcomes. There are studies showing it's not mediated by skin color so it's not because of colorism (independent assortment is a thing).

Not saying anything about superiority in any sense. I'm basically certain this is gonna be the Chinese century at this point (and am reading up to prepare for it). US upper middle-class may be too far gone. Economists tend to point toward the individualism-collectivism axis (1, 2) as a reason for the "Great Divergence," and these days Americans are all a bunch of conformist cowards while the Chinese are hungry as shit. I don't think of whites as the "master race." In fact, I think we've gone through 200 years straight of moderate dysgenics; not enough to explain the Asian-Euro IQ gap (and the Japanese went through their demographic transition a while ago but still score higher) so maybe we have an edge on some other factors, but it's going to be tough to stay competitive.

The idea that we should have a prior in favor of no difference is ridiculous. Only possible if you're heavily invested in social justice over truth normatively. It's been long enough with low gene flow and the differences in social structure all over the world (gene-culture coevolution) are manifest if you know any history.

For phenotypic evidence, see this behavioral econ study. The methodology is a little spare and the results not totally consistent but the fact that all the East Asian countries top one measure of dishonesty, including Japan, suggests to me it's not just a matter of comparative development. Or read this on the guilt-shame distinction. I don't know if that distinction carves reality at its joints and I don't know how you could end up selecting for honesty or "guilt," but it might be a thing. Or look at this on tax cheating. Self-reported ancestry is wonky (the type of person to identity with their English side and the type to identify with their Irish side are probably gonna be different), but maybe the Know Nothings had a point or two?

Also if you click through on that link next to "Big 5" in one of my earlier comments you'll find Nisbett notes that 2nd-generation immigrants converge some with NW Europeans on his novel personality measures but still differ noticeably. He still thinks the difference is environmental (I guess mediated by family), although I think he basically admitted the Ashkenazi-Euro gap was genetic at some point even though everything else is environmental which is kinda funny.

Or I can look at my own experience. The professors at my top 10 uni think the honor code is a joke. Don't think that was true back in the 50s. The math team at my high school got rocked by a massive cheating scandal too (why the hell would you cheat in an extracurricular of all things?). I know somebody who plagiarized an entire final project from alumni for a class in their major and is now going to a top 4 grad school in their discipline. I don't think they even know entirely why they're doing a PhD. Just "paid education."

In general my suspicion is that, in the iterated prisoner's dilemma that is life, NW Europeans tend toward playing C, while other groups tend to play D to varying degrees (more integrated immigrants are better but the gap will get smaller not disappear). You can fix that by just letting go of some freedoms (like honor codes), but it's a cost regardless.

As someone who tries to be an upstanding citizen and wants to raise my kids that way I would prefer for things to not shift toward a defect-heavy equilibrium. It might be hard to herd large masses of people with different preferences into one polity and still make things work.

I would think it would be smarter in the long run to stop pushing for the policies that are pissing people off than to try to suppress the response with moral haranguing. Tyler Cowen is a dilettante but it still might be worth it for you to read "The Complacent Class." The final passage is interesting and mostly references this book on the late Bronze Age collapse.

Pangloss wasn't right. All is not well with the world and Trump is not the worst of it. He is an epiphenomenon not a cause. The past half-century may have built the US and Europe into powder-kegs and the next 50 years are going to be far more interesting than the last. I don't have enough data yet but I have a bad feeling and I see rot.

u/The_Amp_Walrus · 1 pointr/AusFinance

\> But can our economy really grow that much faster than it currently is?

I'm guessing our most productive workers are in inner-city, and we could improve our productivity (and growth) by getting more Australians closer to our capital city central business districts. I've hear economist Tyler Cowen make a similar argument for the United State's most productive cities, like San Franscisco.

Melbourne is ratfucked in this regard, with sprawl and long commute times. This could have been avoided by building denser housing closer to the city and more public transport capacity.

I'm sitting in my 6 story aparment building in Fitzroy looking directly at the CBD, which is like a kilometer away, and most of what I see is 1-2 story houses. How the fuck did we manage that? People avoid moving in closer to the city because of high rents and land prices: something that could be addressed by the government promoting more inner city housing.

New apartments that have been recently built around Melbourne's CBD are tiny, ugly shitboxes and the towers themselves are apparently shoddily build (eg. Opal tower). This didn't have to happen - builders had a set of government controlled incentives that nudged them into building creaking towers full of tiny apartments.

Then there's Fishermen's bend, where the Victorian govenment gave a "grey gift" to the people who owned the land, at the expense of the rest of the Victorian public, which in turn makes it hard for the government to make it a nice place to live.

That's just one facet of our economy where the government has completely dropped the ball, so yeah I think there's heaps of money on the table in terms of growth in Australia.

Interesting pop-econ books on the subject: