****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I follow Cowen's blog closely enough that I was not at all surprised by any of his predictions. Nonetheless I consider this book an essential read, especially if you are interested in politics or economics or automation or science or chess. If, like me, you are a Cowen fan, you'll find here the most comprehensive exegesis of how he sees "things" developing over the next, say, 25 years. In contrast to Marginal Revolution, where Cowen often expresses his vision most eloquently in the text he uses to link to other writing on the Internet, Average Is Over is written in a sort of case-study or war gaming style, trying to tease out the most plausible scenario for the medium run future in a variety of areas. The subtitle is misleading. First, it suggests a horrible airport bookstore business development book for executives. Second, it harkens too much to Cowen's earlier book The Great Stagnation. While this is in some weak sense a "sequel" to TGS, that was a fundamentally more macroeconomically focused book than this. The most interesting parts of Average Is Over are microeconomic in nature and more directly concern chess and online dating. (These parts are interesting partly because of the insight they give into Cowen himself, and his personal and intellectual development. Marginal Revolution, when it reveals anything of Cowen, tends to do so through the lenses of art, travel and cooking, rather than chess or his personal life.)I guess my main complaint about the book is that for someone as well-travelled as Cowen it is rather parochial in scope, basically a story about the US and Western Europe. I should mention that I read Cowen as essentially sanguine about the medium run, while being cognizant of the undesirable nature of some likely or inevitable societal developments. Yet geopolitical considerations are strangely absent from the scenarios he imagines, and it is easy to envision such global considerations making the political or economic situation in, e.g., the US dramatically worse. I know from his blog, for example, that Cowen is a Eurozone (and perhaps European Union?) pessimist; but we get no sense of how the automation trends underlying Cowen's prognostications may or may not influence the possibility of Eurozone breakup, nor what the likely results might be. Cowen explains how economic forces are making our workers want to move to Texas and how the likely continuation of these trends may convince our retirees to move to Mexico, or make our society look more like Mexico's. With the reshoring of manufacturing and the continuation of automation, he sees tighter economic ties between the US, Canada, and Mexico. But what does all this mean for international politics and trade in the Western Hemisphere, more broadly? Finally, and probably most importantly, there is little of Asia in this book, beyond fairly obvious predictions about how competition with China will be demagogued in American politics. Yet the same forces of automation are at work in China and India (witness the robotic noodle chefs in Shanghai Cowen blogged on MR), and China and India are very different from the US (as well as each other) on three crucial axes -- level of economic development, demography, and Internet penetration. So the medium run path for the Chinese and Indian societies and economies is not only opaque to an American economist (and his American readers), but it is also sure to diverge from the American trajectory in interesting ways that cannot help but impact the predictions Cowen makes about US politics and economics. More engagement with this issue would have been interesting. (I could go on to other global issues that surely bear upon Cowen's predictions for the US, such as the slowly simmering sectarian war that has engulfed the Mideast -- with sporadic violent flare-ups -- for 45 years. But now we're really getting beyond the intended scope of his book, so I can more easily forgive such omissions. )Tldr: Tyler's vision for the short- to medium-run future is perhaps slightly surprising (depending on the reader), and maybe a bit unsettling, but pretty much familiar and therefore essentially convincing. The value of this book is not in the novelty of the broad macro arc of said vision --- which can be summarized by the word "automation" --- but in the not-easily-summarized micro-scale insights developed as the story is fleshed out. Despite being fascinating, the books is flawed (in my opinion) for being insufficiently international in scope.
