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Highlights first synced by [[readwise]] [[September 2nd, 2020]]

• I’ve coined the phrase the complacent class to describe the growing number of people in our society who accept, welcome, or even enforce a resistance to things new, different, or challenging. (Location 41)
• These people might in the abstract like some things to change, they might even consider themselves progressive or even radical politically, but in fact they have lost the capacity to imagine or embrace a world where things do change rapidly for most if not all people. (Location 42)
• 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. (Location 55)
• Think of a midlevel teacher or health care worker who is trying to keep the neighborhood in good shape, get the kids into a better college, and save something for a still-uncertain future, all contemporary methods of trying to dig in. (Location 64)
• Think of a single mom with a poorly paid retail job and no college degree, or the ex-con who has dropped out of the labor force because he can’t find a decent job and is now trying to get on disability. (Location 70)
• what these groups have in common is a certain level of social and emotional and indeed ideological acceptance—a presupposition—of slower change. (Location 72)
• those most likely to complain about the complacent class are themselves the prime and often most influential members of that class themselves, namely what I call the privileged class. (Location 91)
• Today the critique is penned, and the enemies of reason and progress are condemned, but then the page is turned and the complacent class turns its attention back to the very appealing comforts of everyday life.1 (Location 100)
• the interstate migration rate has fallen 51 percent below its 1948 to 1971 average and has been falling steadily since the mid-1980s. There has been a decline in the number of start-ups, as a percentage of business activity, since the 1990s. There are also fewer unicorn miracle growth firms, there is less corporate churn and turnover of new firms replacing older firms, and there is a higher market concentration in the sectors where we can measure it. (Location 107)
• But NIMBY is just one specific physical manifestation of a broader mentality of stasis. 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 Anything (Location 119)
• One upshot of this current Zeitgeist of community-enforced social stasis is that our physical infrastructure won’t get much better anytime soon. 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. (Location 125)
• The relative absence of physical construction also makes it harder to put people back to work when bad times roll around, (Location 128)
• what has been lost is the ability to imagine an entirely different world and physical setting altogether, and the broader opportunities for social and economic advancement that would entail. (Location 131)
• 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. (Location 136)
• Most of the complacent class just doesn’t see building restrictions as an urgent issue, (Location 138)
• it seems we like to stay home and remove ourselves altogether from the possible changes of the external physical world. (Location 161)
• only about half of the Millennial Generation bothers to get a driver’s license by age eighteen; (Location 170)
• “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, whereas lately, cars have become more like appliances, with 100,000-mile warranties.”3 (Location 173)
• I kept thinking about how impressed a 1950s audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to immediately realize, “actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought that we’d actually be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.” (Location 186)
• America has been trying to run a new industrial revolution with a limited number of engines while checking potential losses for the well-off and upper middle class. (Location 204)
• In the meantime, politics becomes shrill and symbolic rather than about solving problems or making decisions. If politicians can’t offer voters solutions, they can at least come up with rhetoric and symbols to motivate their supporters to fight for them. Yet the harsh exchanges across different points of view mask an underlying rigidity and complacency: For the most part, American politics does not change and most voters have to be content—or not—with the delivery of symbolic goods rather than actual useful outcomes. (Location 220)
• The American economy is less productive and dynamic, Americans challenge fundamental ideas less, we move around less and change our lives less, and we are all the more determined to hold on to what we have, dig in, and hope (in vain) that, in this growing stagnation, nothing possibly can disturb our sense of calm. (Location 232)
• Internet w/ its ready, free amusements takes edge off human ambition.” (Location 238)
• even with these most positive and diverse of cases, there has been a fundamental shift of societal energy away from building a new and freer world and toward rearranging the pieces in the world we already have. (Location 246)
• It is price and rental rates that are driving different groups apart, not outright prejudice, (Location 264)
• In 2014, in fact, 20,000 such prescriptions were written for children under the age of two. (Location 308)
• Somehow kids are supposed to match the levels of calm and composure we might find in mature forty-seven-year-olds. (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, (Location 313)
• According to another related estimate, 10 percent of American teenagers currently have had medication prescribed for ADHD; (Location 316)
• Flash forward to 2015, when a school district in Washington State bans the game of tag on the grounds of its excessive violence. From now on, those schoolchildren are supposed to keep their hands to themselves during recess. (Location 331)
• 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. (Location 334)
• The share of Americans under thirty who own a business has fallen by about 65 percent since the 1980s. (Location 342)
• Contrary to common impressions, America is creating start-ups at lower rates each decade, and a smaller percentage of those start-ups is rising to prominence, as we see in more detail in chapter 4. We’re not even managing peaceful disruptions, much less violent ones, at our earlier rates. (Location 350)
• this is largely a positive development, but still we need to face up to the fact that many people don’t like it when the world becomes nicer. 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. (Location 358)
• Today’s top novels are more frequently about well-educated, dysfunctional people who live in Brooklyn or the suburbs and who are not entirely happy with their rather well-heeled lives. (Location 418)
• the numbers also show that those who most need to move are, on average, the least likely to do it. (Location 678)
• Individuals who have been willing to move geographically have maintained their previous levels of income mobility, whereas the expected incomes of nonmovers have fallen steadily since the 1980s. (Location 679)
• It is hard to tell whether geographical immobility is causing income immobility in this context, or vice versa, but most likely a bit of both is going on here. (Location 681)
• children who switched neighborhoods when they were young enjoyed much greater economic success later on. (Location 699)
• a typical New Yorker spends about 84 (!) percent of the national median salary on rent. (Location 743)
• “[l]owering regulatory constraints in these [high-productivity] cities to the level of the median city would expand their work force and increase U.S. GDP by 9.5%.” (Location 754)
• most forms of segregation ultimately corrode the basis of prosperity and innovation and eat into the trust and seed capital of society. (Location 784)
• details of your own life, at least in many parts of this country. (Location 787)
• “Back in the civil rights period, it used to be that lighter-skinned people were able to pass and be more acceptable, so they were able to get into organizations or get into companies,” [Legand] Burge says. “Now it’s a little bit different. It’s about cultural fit. Do you laugh at the same jokes? Do you Rollerblade or (Location 1088)
• While I believe that political polarization has increased somewhat, the percentage of independents in the American electorate has not gone down and the percentage of Democrats and Republicans has not gone up. As political scientist Morris Fiorina has noted, “moderate” is still the modal political category for the United States.32 Nonetheless, our federal government largely has fallen apart as a mechanism for solving economic and social problems, in part because Congress cannot agree on much, whether that is more regulation or less regulation or a liberal or conservative program to move forward. (Location 1138)
• by most metrics, as we’ll see, economic opportunity is down and living standards, although they have advanced, are growing more slowly than in the past. (Location 1211)
• By one estimate, start-ups were 12 to 13 percent of the firms in the economy in the 1980s, but today they are only about 7 to 8 percent. That’s right; for all the talk about Silicon Valley, we are less a start-up nation than before. (Location 1214)
• this overall decline in start-up frequency is true for virtually every sector and every American city, and that includes San Francisco and even the legendary tech sector. (Location 1216)
• firms younger than five years old have a pace of job creation and destruction twice as rapid as firms six years or older, (Location 1232)
• Having an older set of business firms means it is harder to switch jobs and also harder to switch where you live, and those trends reinforce each other in the direction of a more general stasis.Employment (Location 1236)
• most of the rise in inequality is across firms rather than within firms. (Location 1416)
• What has slowed down is the ability of other, less-successful, lower-tier companies to bring productivity gains of the same magnitude. (Location 1420)
• The ultimate measure of technological progress is not the number of fancy gadgets we own but rather how much better our lives are. That is what we really care about, (Location 1435)
• the income of the median or typical American household is down since 2000, (Location 1438)
• unless wage gains are very strong in the next few years, this country essentially will have gone twenty years with wage stagnation or near wage stagnation for median earners. (Location 1438)
• The median male wage was higher in 1969 than it is today. (Location 1440)
• A big chunk of our economic gains have been driven by women getting better educations and working longer hours. (Location 1442)
• If we take out the gains of the top earners, take-home pay for typical American workers has been falling since the Great Recession ended in 2009, an unusual path for an economic recovery. (Location 1452)
• When it comes to migration, the net flow of Mexicans is out of the United States, (Location 1467)
• When you put all of these indicators together—low productivity growth, a sluggish labor force, fewer start-ups, greater business concentration, and a slower growth in living standards—the narrative about this period as being a time of unparalleled innovation simply doesn’t hold up. (Location 1485)
• since the 1970s, most travel around the United States has become slower—due to traffic—rather than faster. (Location 1514)
• The more general picture on transportation can be described with two words: less and slower. (Location 1526)
• By using better matching, the American economy is in some fundamental ways doing better than the numbers indicate. Our preferences are better satisfied, above and beyond how this might be reflected in GDP and other economic measures, (Location 1701)
• The internet puts a stiff implicit tax or penalty on competitive status seeking, and it rewards those who are content with something niche and unusual. This may be one reason for the oft-reported diffidence that characterizes many of the Millennial Generation. They are not actually indifferent or lazy or lacking in enthusiasm—quite the contrary—but more and more of their passions take forms other than those of the old climb-the-social-ladder variety. Millennials might therefore appear to be lacking to the older generations who don’t quite get the new terms of competition and satisfaction. In reality, the Millennials are doing pretty well with respect to the options the world has given them, and they are helping move that world toward more contentment and also less interest in grand projects or topping previous records of achievement. They too are part of the complacent class, and they are also its finest product and its most committed ideological carriers. (Location 2063)
• 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. (Location 2079)
• “Black Lives Matter” is notable for avoiding any particular kind of political endorsement, and it is also more positive than destructive in its orientation. (Location 2096)
• Universities massively overregulate themselves, and administrator appointments outpace faculty hires, so everything is set up to minimize the chances of something going wrong or becoming a public disturbance. (Location 2112)