A review by almartin
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

2.0

For a book positing the end of the average, Cowen's most recent work is surprisingly mediocre. To be frank, as a fairly devoted Marginal Revolution reader and an enormous fan of Cowen's thinking, I expected a lot more. Digressive and chatty, but not in a good way; Cowen never puts together anything more demanding than what you might read in a Sunday opinion column. Far too much of the book is devoted to the intricacies of freestyle chess -- whatever the strength of that metaphor, Average is Over would have a much stronger argument if 25 pages of chess digression was swapped out with some serious charts and graphs. Brynjolfsson and McAfee's Race Against the Machine is superior in virtually every dimension -- and at $3.99 for the e-book, a perfect illustration of the forces mentioned within.