The Great Stagnation
The Great Stagnation

Author: Tyler Cowen

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-01-25

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 1101502258

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Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Fully Grown
Fully Grown

Author: Dietrich Vollrath

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-06-24

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0226820041

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Vollrath challenges our long-held assumption that growth is the best indicator of an economy’s health. Most economists would agree that a thriving economy is synonymous with GDP growth. The more we produce and consume, the higher our living standard and the more resources available to the public. This means that our current era, in which growth has slowed substantially from its postwar highs, has raised alarm bells. But should it? Is growth actually the best way to measure economic success—and does our slowdown indicate economic problems? The counterintuitive answer Dietrich Vollrath offers is: No. Looking at the same facts as other economists, he offers a radically different interpretation. Rather than a sign of economic failure, he argues, our current slowdown is, in fact, a sign of our widespread economic success. Our powerful economy has already supplied so much of the necessary stuff of modern life, brought us so much comfort, security, and luxury, that we have turned to new forms of production and consumption that increase our well-being but do not contribute to growth in GDP. In Fully Grown, Vollrath offers a powerful case to support that argument. He explores a number of important trends in the US economy: including a decrease in the number of workers relative to the population, a shift from a goods-driven economy to a services-driven one, and a decline in geographic mobility. In each case, he shows how their economic effects could be read as a sign of success, even though they each act as a brake of GDP growth. He also reveals what growth measurement can and cannot tell us—which factors are rightly correlated with economic success, which tell us nothing about significant changes in the economy, and which fall into a conspicuously gray area. Sure to be controversial, Fully Grown will reset the terms of economic debate and help us think anew about what a successful economy looks like.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth
The Rise and Fall of American Growth

Author: Robert J. Gordon

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-08-29

Total Pages: 785

ISBN-13: 1400888956

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How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

The Rise and Decline of Nations
The Rise and Decline of Nations

Author: Mancur Olson

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0300157673

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A leading political economist advances a new theory to explain the postwar shifts in the relative economic fortunes and positions of various nations and regions.

Secular Stagnation on the Supply Side
Secular Stagnation on the Supply Side

Author: Robert J. Gordon

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 27

ISBN-13:

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Secular stagnation refers not to the literal stagnation, i.e., stopping of economic growth but rather to the slowing of U.S. potential real GDP growth to half or less of its historical pace. The retardation of potential real GDP growth matters both because of its direct impact on the standard of living and also because of its indirect effect on net investment, which in turn feeds back to slower productivity growth. During the decade ending in 2014:Q4, U.S. real GDP grew at only 1.55% per year, almost exactly half the growth rate of 3.12% per year achieved during the previous three decades, 1974-2004, and an even smaller fraction of the 3.62% per year performance of 1929-1974. This paper predicts that slow growth of around 1.5% per year will continue over the next decade or two. Part of the slowdown in output growth is due to a decline in the growth rate of the working age population. A second reason is a shift in worker hours per capita from an increase due to the entry of women into the labor force during 1965-1995 to a future decrease due primarily to the retirement of the baby-boom generation. A third reason is an ongoing slowdown in the growth rate of output per hour, from 1.72% per year during 1974-2004 to 1.10% per year in 2004-2014 and to an even slower 0.55% per year during 2009-2014. The sources of the decline in productivity growth combine diminishing returns that have set in following the ICT revolution of the 1996-2004 "dot.com" era with a decline in business dynamism, as the entry of new business firms has steadily declined over the past three decades relative to the exit of existing firms. Moore's Law describing the steady exponential increase in the number of transistors on a chip became obsolete a decade ago. The historic rise of educational attainment has slowed to a crawl, and the declining share of children growing up in two-parent families may lead to a future decrease in high school completion and an increase in criminal activity among youth. While future productivity growth will be slower than before 2004, it will still continue as in the past decade at a rate slightly in excess of one% per year.

Diminishing Returns
Diminishing Returns

Author: Mark Blyth

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-07-07

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 0197607853

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"The Global Financial Crisis and the following period of 'secular stagnation' have raised questions about the state of modern economics and macroeconomics in particular. This has had repercussions for social sciences that deal with economic issues. In particular in the fields of International Political Economy (IPE) and Comparative Political Economy (CPE) there is rising interest in non-mainstream macroeconomic theories (Blyth and Matthijs 2017, Baccaro and Pontussen 2016). In CPE there is a recognition that the field has in the past decades increasingly shifted to institutional and microeconomic questions and disregarded Keynesian considerations of macroeconomic instability and problems of fallacies of composition (Schwartz and Tranoy 2019). The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of post-Keynesian economics (PKE) as a non-mainstream macroeconomic theory"--

The Age of Diminished Expectations
The Age of Diminished Expectations

Author: Paul R. Krugman

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780262611343

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This edition looks at how risky behaviour can lead to disaster in private markets, with colourful examples from Lloyd's of London and Sumitomo Metals. Krugman also considers the collapse of the Mexican peso, and the burst of Japan's 'bubble' economy.

The Anatomy of Stagnation in a Modern Economy
The Anatomy of Stagnation in a Modern Economy

Author: Robert E. Hall

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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In 2008, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression launched a deep contraction of the US economy. Output fell quickly to a level 10% below trend. Unemployment reached 10% of the labour force. Seven years after the crisis, unemployment was back to normal, but output was 15% below trend. Stagnation had set in. The most important source of the stagnation was a sharp decline in productivity growth. A decline in R&D and other productivity-enhancing investment was at least partially responsible. That decline began before the crisis, but the financial events of 2008 worsened the cutback. A second major source of stagnated output and income was capital depletion. Investment in business equipment fell in half immediately after the crisis. Cumulatively, the effect of below-trend investment accounted for 5 of the 15 percentage points of the shortfall in output. The third major development accounting for stagnation in output was a decline in the labour force that remained after unemployment had returned to normal. This development accounted for more than 3 percentage points of the shortfall in output. As a general matter, the direct decline in labour input and in output associated with the rise in unemployment was not important by 2015, but the follow-on stagnation operating through the effects on the two types of capital formation was substantial.