Book of the week: Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

(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.”

“If this were Swiftian satire, Cowen could retire the Best Deadpan Award,” said William A. Galston in The Wall Street Journal. But the author seems truly untroubled by the American future he foresees: an “extremely wealthy” top 10 to 15 percent, an enlarged underclass, and many fewer middle-income households than we have today. He’s predicting the ultimate meritocracy, a nation where machines determine who is a useful citizen and the losers have no basis for complaint as public services are slashed to nothing. As a parent, I read this book “with a deepening sense of dread,” said Philip Delves Broughton, also in the Journal. But Cowen does offer today’s children some hope. He predicts that online university courses will doom all but the most prestigious schools while providing free higher education to the masses. Still, poorer students will have to be profoundly motivated. Education, he writes, “will become more like the Marines.”

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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.”