zombieopf.blogg.se - The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon

Since the 1970s, the only areas of live where developed countries have known improvements that are comparable to what happened between 18 are entertainment and communication.

Once this potential was realised, the scope for inventions with a similar impact on daily lives was greatly reduced (“plumbing and flushed toilets could only be invented once”).

Changes in real GDP underestimate the impact of those changes on wellbeing - by a lot (one example given by Gordon is the monotony of meals if you are limited to locally produced seasonal vegetables and fruit – refrigeration in transport and storage has fundamentally changed the quality of our diets).

The years between 18 were an unbelievably innovative period, with inventions that improved daily lives beyond recognition: plumbed water, electricity, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioning, telephone, cars.The key driving force behind economic growth is technical change, not the accumulation of capital ("Without technical change, capital accumulation would amount to piling wooden plows on top of existing wooden plows" Evsey Domar).Robert Gordon is probably the most famous of the techno pessimists, who claim that there are fundamental reasons for the slowdown in productivity growth observed in the US since the early 1970s, and that it is very unlikely that the underlying causes will change in the foreseeable future, if ever.Īlthough Gordon’s book entirely focuses on the US, it does contain masses of insights that are generally valid, and it makes the book well worth reading even if you are not American. Techno optimists such as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee claim that technologies such as machine learning have the potential to become “general purpose technologies” that will be as transformative as the steam engine and electricity once were. One of the few debates between economists that has reached a non-specialist audience over the last five years is that between the so-called “techno optimists” and “techno pessimists”.