Economic Growth Isn’t Everything

When you say that the golden days of growth are over, expect to get lots of attention, especially if you’re a prestigious economist. Robert Gordon, a professor at Northwestern University, has been going around for several years making exactly this case. He now has a book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” summarizing his argument in magisterial detail.

Gordon’s main thesis is that the low-hanging fruit of technology has, essentially, been picked. He argues that a small handful of Great Inventions — electricity, the internal combustion engine and a few others — propelled growth to dizzying speeds from about 1870 through 1970. But there are only so many big important ideas like this to be discovered.

This may be the case. With technology, you never really know what’s out there to discover until you find it. Perhaps we will soon invent self-improving artificial intelligences that will rapidly uncover deep truths and invent magical technologies of which we can now only dream. Or maybe the technology party really is drawing to a close. But regardless of its validity, I think that Gordon’s idea has a little more popular appeal than it ought to, for two reasons. Read More…