The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
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Last annotated on March 2, 2017
Americans are in fact working much harder than before to postpone change, or to avoid it altogether,Read more at location 35
growing number of people in our society who accept, welcome, or even enforce a resistance to things new,Read more at location 41
They correctly believe their lives are very good, and they want things to stayRead more at location 49
These individuals tend to be tolerant, liberal in the broad sense of that word,Read more at location 50
ironically, many of them have become sufficiently insulated from hardship and painful changeRead more at location 52
Because they are intelligent, articulate, and often socially graceful, they usually seem like very nice people, and often they are. Think of a financier or lawyer who vacations in France or Italy, has wonderful kids, and donates generously to his or her alma mater. I think of these people as the wealthiest and best educated 3 to 5 percent of the American population.Read more at location 54
The individuals who dig in are more likely to be of middling station when it comes to income and education. They are not at the top of their professions for the most part, and they may have professional jobs, such as being dentists, or nonprofessional jobs, such as owning small businesses. Still, by either global or historical standards their lives are nonetheless remarkably good, and full of “first-world problems.”Read more at location 57
Those who get stuck are the individuals who, among other combinations of possibilities, may have grown up in highly segregated neighborhoods, received a subpar education, were exposed to significant environmental toxins like lead paint, have parents who drank in excess or abused opiates, were abused as children, became alcoholics or drug abusers themselves, or perhaps ended up in jail. Their pasts, presents, and futures are pretty bad, and they are not happy about their situations.Read more at location 67
You might think the group at the bottom cannot possibly be complacent about their situation, but by standards of recent history, indeed they have been when it comes to their actual behavior.Read more at location 75
a core of about 15 to 20 percent of the American population is doing extraordinarily well,Read more at location 82
There is an ongoing collapse of the middle class, as is often reported in the media, but the underreported upside is that some of the middle class is graduating into the upper class. The bad news, however, is that the accompanying structures are not ultimately sustainable for the broader majority of the population. As overall social and economic dynamism declines and various forms of lock-in increase, it becomes harder to finance and maintain the superstructure that keeps stability and all of its comforts in place.Read more at location 83
The Watts riots of 1965 put 4,000 people in jail and led to thirty-four killed and hundreds injured; during an eighteen-month period in 1971–1972, there were more than 2,500 domestic bombings reported, averaging out to more than five a day.Read more at location 95
in the 1960s and 1970s, not only did riots and bombings happen, but large numbers of influential intellectuals endorsed them,Read more at location 98
revolutionary changes in information technology as of late, big parts of our lives are staying the same.Read more at location 105
The clearest physical manifestation of these ongoing processes of segregation is NIMBY—NotRead more at location 115
There is also: NIMEY—Not In My Election Year NIMTOO—Not In My Term Of Office LULU—Locally Undesirable Land Use NOPE—Not On Planet Earth CAVE—Citizens Against Virtually Everything BANANA—Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near AnythingRead more at location 120
Every time a community turns down a new apartment complex or retail development, it limits America’s economic dynamism by thwarting opportunities for those lower on the socioeconomic ladder.Read more at location 126
upward mobility of Americans, in terms of income and education, which increased through about 1980, has since held steady.Read more at location 134
Two researchers, Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, estimate that if it were cheaper to move into America’s higher-productivity cities, the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) would be 9.5 percent higher due to the gains from better jobs.Read more at location 136
no one thinks that the building restrictions of, say, San Francisco or New York will be relaxedRead more at location 138
complacent class just doesn’t see building restrictions as an urgent issue,Read more at location 139
In past generations, people moved through the physical world at ever faster speeds,Read more at location 144
today traffic gets worse each year and plane travel is, if anything, slower than before.Read more at location 145
over the last few decades, the interest in those kinds of transportation-based, landscape-transforming projects largely has faded away.Read more at location 152
Elon Musk’s hyperloop plans will remain on the drawing board for the foreseeable future, and the settlement of Mars is yet farther away.Read more at location 152
Urban progress is less transformational and more a matter of making more neighborhoods look and act like the nicer neighborhoods—namely gentrification.Read more at location 153
we like to stay home and remove ourselves altogether from the possible changesRead more at location 161
Prepared meal services such as Hello Fresh will send you all the ingredients you need to make a meal. Wash.io will come pick up and do your laundry. Need an oil change? Press a button on an app and your oil change arrives a few hours later. Want to watch your kid play little league baseball? You can do that on Apple TV. Americans can literally have almost every possible need cared for without leaving their homes. This is a new form of American passivity,Read more at location 162
But today, 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. Today, social media and the smartphone are more important both practically and symbolically. Mark Liszewski, executive director of the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum (Hershey, Pennsylvania), remarked: “Instead of Ford versus Chevy, it’s Apple versus Android. And instead of customizing their ride, today’s teens customize their phones with covers and apps. You express yourself through your phone,Read more at location 170
Apart from this shift in mentality, cars are harder to afford for a lot of young people due to sluggish wages and rising college tuition.Read more at location 176
migration of Millennials into larger cities, where Uber, bike lanes, and car-sharingRead more at location 177
it is harder to have a meaningful debate about how the money should be spent because most of the money is already spoken for,Read more at location 217
politics becomes shrill and symbolic rather than about solving problems or making decisions.Read more at location 221
most voters have to be content—or not—with the delivery of symbolic goods rather than actual useful outcomes.Read more at location 223
61 percent of all private-sector financial liabilities are guaranteed by the federal government,Read more at location 226
Americans can use innovative, ever more efficient information technology to slow down the change in many parts of lifeRead more at location 236
Match.com matches us in love. 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.Read more at location 241
The great adventures of life, the surprise of strangers, of strangeness, of the electric and eclectic moments of happenstance, and also of extreme ambition, are slowly being removed by code as a path to a new contentment. We are using the acceleration of information transmission to decelerate changes in our physical world.Read more at location 250
One study from 1932 found that over a third of the people in one part of Philadelphia married someone who lived within five blocks. A more recent study showed that of the couples who married between 2005 and 2012, more than one-third of them met online; for same-sex couples, that figure is almost 70 percent.Read more at location 257
more segregation by income and educational status and indirectly more segregation by raceRead more at location 263
There is also more assortative mating of high earners and high achievers—theRead more at location 265
wiser police departments confer with consultants and public relations expertsRead more at location 275
In the 1970s, intellectual, angst-ridden American teenagers noodled over Nietzsche,Read more at location 281
less concerned with the titanic struggle of good versus evil—can you imagine Mr. Darcy shouting, as would a Dostoyevsky character, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted!”?Read more at location 285
That is a far step away from the 1960s, when the battle was over the right to denounce authority, sometimes sliding into outright advocacy of violence, as with the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.Read more at location 290
In the 1970s, American gay culture was a source of innovation, restlessness, and outright rejection of traditional bourgeois values. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the mainstreaming of many LGBT communities and their incorporation into a very stable and legalistic status quo. As a result, there is certainly more happiness, more equality, and more justice, all good things. Yet gay culture as a driver of radical change—rather than as satisfied contentment—probably peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s, with the evolution of sexual mores and the evolution of disco, house, and other musical forms out of “outsider” gay communities, as well as the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring.Read more at location 292
The 1960s was also an era that called for greater freedom with drug experimentation.Read more at location 297
American citizens chose the one—marijuana—that makes users spacey, calm, and sleepy.Read more at location 298
drugs that have boomed are the antidepressant medications, including Prozac, Zoloft, Wellbutrin,Read more at location 302
Sharp, who wrote one of the seminal studies of antidepressants, notes that we’re just not that into personal authenticity anymore, and furthermore social media have busted our notion of having a “true self” for the medications to ruin.Read more at location 305
give drugs for schizophrenic and bipolar individuals to disruptive children under five years of age.Read more at location 307
Medication became the accepted answer to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),Read more at location 310
kids are supposed to match the levels of calm and composure we might find in mature forty-seven-year-olds.Read more at location 312
Estimates vary, but according to some, almost 20 percent of American boys and 10 percent of American girls, ages fourteen to seventeen, have been diagnosed with ADHD, yet that concept, with the attention deficit disorder label, wasn’t even formally introduced into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders until 1980, although there were earlier and far more marginal notions of hyperactive and hyperkinetic children.Read more at location 313
In 1965, the most common leisure activity for American kids was outdoor play.Read more at location 321
looking at electronic screens, which include televisions, computers, and cell phones.Read more at location 323
In the 1970s, a game called dodgeball—one variation of which was known as bombardment—was popular in American schools. The premise was to throw a hard, inflated ball at the players on the other side with as much force as possible, to see if they could catch it without dropping it. The face and the belly were two popular targets for each hurl, and of course the most fearful and intimidated players had the most tosses sent their way. At least in my elementary school, it wasn’t unusual for a kid to get whacked in the face and leave the playing field crying. I recall my gym coach barking out, “Suck it up, kid!” Flash forward to 2015, when a school district in Washington State bans the game of tag on the grounds of its excessive violence.Read more at location 327
In late 2015, I read of a seventh grader who was told his Star Wars shirt was not allowed in school because it portrayed a weapon, namely, a lightsaber.Read more at location 334
the safest possible activities, most of all homework, and also classifying them more thoroughly through more testing.Read more at location 338
Americans under thirty who own a business has fallen by about 65 percent since the 1980s.Read more at location 343
John Lettieri, who was a cofounder of the Economic Innovation Group, has argued that “Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.”Read more at location 345
in spite of a few highly visible examples, such as Uber and AirBnb, disruption in the world of business is down too.Read more at location 350
The big losers from a lot of these trends are the unskilled men, including those with the less peaceful or more violent inclinations.Read more at location 353
postfeminist gender relations, and egalitarian semicosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many men, most of all those who have no real chance of joining the privileged class.Read more at location 356
They do less well with nice. And eventually they will respond by behaving badly, whether it is at a Donald Trump rally or through internet harassment.Read more at location 359
the male median wage, at least as it is measured and adjusted for inflation, was higher back in 1969 than it is today.Read more at location 361
In medieval times, for instance, the Catholic Church sought to shut down a lot of theological dissent. For a while this worked, but eventually the result was a far-reaching and fundamental process known as the Reformation, which had major political, economic, and religious ramifications for centuries.Read more at location 375
The first very visible indication of the Great Reset was the financial crisis of 2007–2008, which punctured old myths about the efficacy of the American financial system and revealed that the country is on a fundamentally lower path of economic growth.Read more at location 379
