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

Shits fucked and it’s your fault and that's why Trump won.

Tyler's thesis is fairly straightforward: the modern liberal theory of ever-increasing economic peace, prosperity and freedom might not be right. Instead, society tends to be cyclical with periods of social stability and social volatility feeding off one another. This isn't a new theory, just a new application of old logic. George Modelski in Long Cycles in World Politics describes how cycles can describe the rise and fall of hegemonic powers. Economists describe business cycles and credit cycles. The idea of "named generations" like "Baby Boomer" and "Millenial" comes from a generational cycle that had four rotating archetypes.

To Tyler, the peace and stability of the 80s, 90s, and 00s was a reaction to the violence and rebellion of the 70s and 60s (whose seed were sown in the stable, pseudo-idyllic 50s).

Tyler's weight of evidence behind his thesis is what he calls "canaries in the coal mines" and he means to use them the same way rising foreclosures would have been canaries in 2007 preceding the Great Recession. These canaries are rather simple: shits fucked.

But shit isn't just fucked at an economic level, it's fucked at every level. It is culturally, morally, economically, politically fucked. People have stopped moving, racism has to stop receding, the economy has stopped innovating, and Americans have lost their spiritual drive to get out of bed, much less change the world around them.

Tyler leaves some explanations on the floor: maybe technological growth has decelerated because we’re literally at the physical limits of the universe? Maybe economic growth has slowed down because we have a bunch of old white people who want nothing more than to retire and take benefits? Maybe interstate mobility has decreased because it doesn’t really matter where you work anymore?

He also fails to mention that despite the torrent of rain, dust, and sun that is heading toward us, our society has been inexorably quiet with regards to climate change.

But other than these oversights, the effect is a book of dark statistics with little in the ways of solutions. Worth reading if you want to see the web of shit that overlays society.