The Complacent Class

In The Complacent Class (2017), Tyler Cowen documented a multi-decade trend: Americans had stopped moving, stopped switching jobs, stopped starting companies, stopped taking the risks that had once defined the national character. Residential mobility fell to post-WWII lows. Interstate migration declined. Entrepreneurship rates dropped among younger cohorts. This was not laziness but rational response to an environment where the costs of change were high and expected benefits uncertain. Moving meant leaving accumulated social capital. Switching careers meant abandoning hard-won expertise. The complacent choice—staying put, optimizing existing arrangements—was individually defensible. Collectively, it produced fragility: a society of people who had arranged their lives around stability discovered that stability was not guaranteed, and when disruption arrived, they lacked the adaptive capacity the previous generation possessed.