Remarkable Reading #14: THE COMPLACENT CLASS - The Self Defeating Quest For The American Dream By Tyler Cowen and CONSUMPTIONOMICS: Asia's Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet

The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.

Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself  and belong directly to the author.  The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.

Carrying on further from Remarkable Reading #13 here.

The next set of take-outs touch on two topics:

1) Transportation and driverless cars
2) Mobility and infrastructure

From Tyler Cowen's THE COMPLACENT CLASS: THE SELF-DEFEATING QUEST FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM.

Page 10 - “America’s future is likely to bring a much greater use of driverless cars, which will be a major gain in terms of safety and convenience.  But just think of the reorientation in terms of cultural and emotional significance.  It will be the car's controlling us rather than vice versa.  The driver of the American car used to drive an entire economy, but now the driver will be passive, and what will the culture become?  This new orientation would have seemed deeply strange to our ancestors, but we are trying to talk ourselves into seeing this obsession with digitalized information as normal”

Page 31 - “Since the gold age of manufacturing in the postwar era, American regions have lost much of their distinct economic flavour, blurring into a melange of more or less indistinguishable service sector offerings.  Each region has its shopping malls, its hospitals, its schools in what is now a nationally recognizable sameness. If you are a nurse, or a medical technology assistant, or a teacher or a yoga instructor, you can consider working in any reasonably populated part of the country”

Page 195 - “The differences between America’s wealthy and less well-developed cities and suburbs have become big enough to resurrect economic motives as a reason to relocate, so rates of residential mobility rise again, leading to a new pioneer class.  Driverless vehicles and better transit systems make these new commutes bearable.

Artificial intelligence, smart software , robotics and the “internet of things” have come together to bring significant productivity gains and lots of disruptive change.  You walk around your house, or the store, and ask for things to happen and they do. You can ask any question just by talking to yourself, and a good answer comes immediately”

From Chandan Nair's CONSUMPTIONOMICS the further key take-out's are:

Page 82 - “Unfortunately, considering the dilemma of how today;’s consumption will impact  future generations does not with within the spectrum of economic thought.  Economics focuses on short-term thinking, and here lies the biggest problem”

Page 90 - “To do this we have to reverse centuries of thinking.  Human history, at least since the invention of agriculture, has been about losses of natural capital - be it fossil fuels, rainforests, fisheries, coral reefs, aquifers, or even land via desertification or flooding due to rising sea levels.  Before the industrial revolution, the earth could readily bear these costs, so they were ignored”

Page 130 - “In the transport sector , the emphasis must be on providing people with mobility rather than the right to own and use private cars.  Emissions and resource taxes will go a long way by themselves to internalize the environmental costs of motor vehicles, but other external factors - including congestion, accidents, noise, and the impact of road building and land-use and landscapes - must also be included in the price of driving”.

Page 130 - “Within between such communities, transport systems will be necessary that provide more than first-class public transport - looking at ways of increasing individual mobility while using the fewest resources”

Page 131 - “Future systems could go far beyond road pricing.  By integrating communications, location and internet technologies, for example, travellers for short as well as long journeys could arrange their travel by booking into networks of local taxis and buses, train or light rail networks, even bicycle hires, that allow them to make journeys as quickly -maybe even more quickly - than they could with private cars.  Certainly it is not utopian to suggest that there must be alternatives to the gridlock that many cities experience in both the West and Asia”

Page 174 - “For the foreseeable future our societies will be capitalist.  Even in China,where state-owned companies have successfully retained control over the economy’s most strategic sectors, most decisions on supply, demand and pricing are likely to be broadly set by markets, not government diktat”.

You can follow Tyler Cowen on Twitter here, visit his website here, and buy a copy of THE COMPLACENT CLASS: THE SELF-DEFEATING QUEST FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM here.

You can visit the CONSUMPTIONOMICS website here, visit his Wikipedia page here and purchase a copy of CONSUMPTIONOMICS: Asia's Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet here.

Thank you,

Praz

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