That has been my argument about America for the better part of fifteen years. I've given copius footnotes about the "low hanging fruit" and spoken of the great cultures that disappeared as if a neutron bomb had landed and wiped out people while leaving the agricultural and forest technology intact. Francis Jennings said 20 years ago that America resembled not a virgin wilderness but a widow. Is it because this guy is a white man or because its been said so much that someone finally tipped the scales and now everyone is saying. Inference is a bitch.
REH PS I have been conserving our cultural and intellectual artifacts in the Arts and religious processes since I left the reservation in 1960 and after religion was legal in 1978. Now I'm facing people who look at it not as history but as memorabilia. Go figure. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ed Weick Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2012 8:47 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION'; [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] The end of growth? 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+cr isis/7233960/story.html#ixzz26LvAUCJ9> http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/What+slow+growth+wasn+result+cause+cri sis/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
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