(Dutton, $27)
Tyler Cowen has seen the future, and it’s not pretty, said Robert Herritt in TheDailyBeast.com. In his provocative and “genuinely enlightening” new book, the university economist and influential blogger matter-of-factly predicts that the gap in America between the haves and have-nots will widen dramatically as “genius machines” assume an ever greater role in the economy. “Even a few years ago, this forecast would have sounded silly,” but “Cowen’s not talking about flying cars.” He’s talking about shopping carts that monitor your path through the supermarket, workplace performance being recorded and digitally analyzed, and wearable devices that know more about our emotional states than we do. Cowen’s advice? Be a person whose efforts complement the work of these computers or get used to falling wages. “Many of society’s lower earners,” he writes, “will have to reshape their tastes toward cheaper desires.”
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Cowen ultimately seems “too sanguine about the politics of polarization,” said David Rennie in The Economist. He downplays the likelihood of social unrest by pointing out that society in the Middle Ages was both dramatically stratified and relatively stable. Still, Cowen’s main point is plausible, that we need to face the prospect that the bottom 85 percent are mainly doomed to stay there. “In a country founded on hope, that would require something like a new social contract.”
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