In his last book, economist Tyler Cowen wrote about how machine intelligence could change the world. In his new book, The Complacent Class, he writes about the forces that prevent change from happening. In particular, he argues that America has become more averse to change in recent decades, and that this has transformed our work, our leisure, and our neighborhoods.

I asked Cowen to explain his thesis and what it means for our companies, our careers, and even our politics. The conversation was edited for clarity and concision.

HBR: In the book, you write, “Americans are in fact working much harder than before to postpone change or to avoid it altogether.” What are some examples of that?

Cowen: Fighting changes to your community, like making sure nothing happens to where you live that will lower the value of your house. Making sure your entitlement payments are not cut. In general, digging in, trying to make your neighborhood as safe as possible. Applying a kind of precautionary principle to most innovations that come to society. Those are all ways in which we’re working to defend the status quo.

And yet, with the election of Trump, I think political disruption is coming sooner than many people expected. Even sooner than I expected. I predicted it in the book, but I didn’t predict it would come before the book was published! We’re seeing a response in terms of protests and social movements where I think we get a bit of a redo of a lot of angles of the 1960s, but with social media to speed it all up. And that will be a very interesting, but also a somewhat scary, experiment. I see the 1960s as a very important and instructive era for us right now.

Are there specific pockets of society where you see the “complacent class” represented?

I think there’s several different layers of the complacent class in this country. If you’re an educated elite, you’re already in a very comfortable position, and, in essence, you simply have to avoid losing what you have. If you’re lower-middle class, and maybe life is tougher, you’ve seen some wage stagnation. It may sound like those people are not complacent, but if you compare them to earlier times in American history — the 1930s, or the Civil War period, or the 1960s — people’s willingness to just put up with things, to improve the quality of their leisure and then get on with life and not really agitate for very urgent change, that’s higher than before. It comes in even for people you wouldn’t think are, or should be, complacent. It turns out that very often they settle for the status quo.

And all this is happening during a time when we see a lot of change in technology, particularly in IT and machine learning, and, potentially, artificial intelligence. How does that progress fit with your thesis?

Well, there is a lot of change, but it’s concentrated in some areas. Look at a classic 20th-century notion of progress: how quickly you can move through physical space. That hasn’t gotten faster for a long time. Planes are not faster. With cars, there’s more traffic. It’s actually harder to get around, and that makes the physical world less dynamic. It’s harder to build things in the United States.

The thing that’s much easier to do is sit at home and have all of life come to you. You speak to your Alexa or your Echo, and you have things be ordered. You use the internet. You watch on Netflix. It’s made us all much more homebodies, feeling we don’t need to change things, more comfortable in our consumption patterns. And obviously that has big private gains, or people wouldn’t be doing it. But there’s nonetheless a collective effect that I think is worrying when our physical and geographic spaces become less dynamic, less mobile, less intermixed. And that’s the America we’re seeing today.

The book talks a lot about sorting and segregation. Explain how this complacency, and the sorting and segregation that drive it, have shaped our work and our business lives.

People today are much more able to pair off with others who are like themselves. Democrats are much more likely to live next door to other Democrats than used to be the case. There’s now more opposition to marrying across political parties than there is across race, at least if you poll people.

But I think the most important notion is a general physical segregation by income. Rich people live with other rich people. Less-well-off people tend to live together. There are many fewer economically mixed neighborhoods. And we know from the research of Raj Chetty that mixed neighborhoods are very good for economic and social mobility, and we’re losing those pretty rapidly as areas gentrify. And along with that is a kind of side effect — in many parts of the country, not all — of more racial segregation. In schools there’s often more racial segregation, not motivated by racism in general, but by differences in income and wealth. I think that, too, is unhealthy.

We’ve seen some of these patterns playing out in how industries and companies are structured. You talk about this a little bit in the book: a sort of a divergence in the fates of companies and workers.

Yeah, we’ve had the rise of what’s called the “super firm.” Google and Facebook and Apple are the most obvious examples. Companies that are just much, much more productive than their competitors, and they even innovate in a wide range of areas. They’re fairly small in number, the super firms. They’ve been very creative, but these days you tend to either be a well-established employee with a really good company, and then they invest a lot in you and that’s a very good career, or you have a job that ends up being commoditized and you’re fairly separate from the super firms and you’re more likely to see some form of wage stagnation. That’s become much more bifurcated over time.

One other business example I would give for thinking about how matching works is the market for music. It used to be, really not that long ago, that most of the music people consumed and bought was new music. A lot of it was junk, but some of it was great. Today you match first with iTunes, and then Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, so at any point in time you can listen to exactly what you want to listen to, exactly what you feel like. And that’s wonderful for a listener, but the end result is people spend much more time with older music and we’re cutting into the stream of creativity that we’re producing for future listeners. That’s another example of why matching can be good for the individual but bad for innovativeness in broader society.

What do you see happening with AI? Will it push us to take change seriously and want more of it? Or is it going to provoke a backlash?

AI will have a big impact, but it will take a long period of time. And one of the biggest problems is us. Take driverless cars, trucks, and other vehicles. We know they can work, but in terms of the legal and regulatory framework, it will be decades, I think, before we pass enough laws that they can revolutionize our lives. Actually, the short-run effect will be to put a lot of truck drivers out of work, and the jobs will be lost before new jobs for those people are created.

How do you think about how much the pros and cons of dynamism go together? Can we move toward a world where we are getting more and more of the good without the bad?

I’ve stressed that the social gains of dynamism are very likely to be positive, driverless vehicles being one example of many. But the short-run private returns for most people will feel negative. We’ll see jobs disappear, and we’ll have to master new technologies. There will be significant adjustment and transition costs. Having driverless vehicles before we have the infrastructure for those vehicles to really make sense, that will take a lot of doing. Just look at how hard it is to improve infrastructure today — simple things like fixing potholes or building a new bridge.

I think it’s a process where we’re actually better off accelerating it, as much of the 20th century did. [Instead, we’re making] it a lot more painful, and that’s to protect our own private positions.

What does the complacent class thesis mean for our politics going forward?

If you look at the federal budget, we’ve moved from a situation where about 20% of it was decided in advance, say, in the early 1960s, to where about 80% of the budget is locked into entitlements, essentially. I’m not saying all, or even any, of those entitlements are bad. It’s a separate question. But in terms of the degrees of freedom the federal government has to spend money on new projects, new ideas, and the next moonshot, we don’t live in the world we used to, and basically our government is playing defense in trying to cover expenditures it feels it has to cut, rather than building for our future. Almost all of the money is going to helping people protect something they already have. Because we hate loss, we dislike risk. My preference would be to do much less of that, but realistically, I don’t see any chance of that happening.