Interesting review by Andrew Coyne in today's Ottawa Citizen of Tyler Cowan's
"The Great Stagnation". In part, Coynes says the following:
... Cowen argues that slow growth is more the old normal than the new:
Median incomes in the United States have been moving sideways for the better
part of four decades, as have most measures of productivity.
While others have made much the same point, Cowen locates that decades-long
slump in a still larger historical frame. Indeed, it may not be the era of
stagnation that is the anomaly, but the long period of rapid growth that
preceded it.
For the first three centuries or so of European settlement, he argues,
America enjoyed the benefits of a number of "low-hanging fruit." It had an
abundance of arable land, for starters, which settlers could claim for free -
and not only land, but resources. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, it
had access to a similar abundance of labour, as millions left the farms for the
cities; as, later, it could call upon seemingly endless re-serves of skilled
labour, as more and more of these new workers went on to get an education.
And, perhaps most critically, it profited from a truly astonishing series
of inventions, from electricity to the light bulb to the automobile to the
telephone. Much the same story could be told of other industrial countries, of
course. But nowhere did land, labour and technological progress combine to
produce such enormous wealth as in America.
Read more:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/What+slow+growth+wasn+result+cause+crisis/7233960/story.html#ixzz26LvAUCJ9
Reminds one of Keith Hudson's argument that growth is based on new consumers
goods that everyone wants, but it would appear that Cowan's argument is much
broader.
Must buy the book.
Ed
_______________________________________________
Futurework mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
