It’s one of those autumn days in Washington, DC when you want to pull away from General Assembly speeches (though they’re important) and world politics to just take a moment to live — or grab a book and enjoy one of those post-summer sublime days.

Luckily, I had one of those books in my hands already: Tyler Cowen’s new book, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation.

It’s superb, as expected.  If the message of his January 2011 book The Great Stagnation was we aren’t as rich as we thought we were, the message of Average is Over is we aren’t as smart as we thought we were.