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-----Original Message----- From: pe...@mail.csuchico.edu [mailto:pe...@mail.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of Louis Proyect full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/08/18/why-economic-growth-will-fall/ Thanks, but is this sort of argument plausible? "Productivity growth slowed sharply after 1970, with little variability from decade to decade. The slowdown has been puzzling scholars for four decades. My own view is that it is a decline from one thousand cuts. Important ones are rising energy prices, growing regulatory burdens, a structural shift from high- to low-productivity growth sectors (such as from manufacturing to services), as well as the source that Gordon emphasizes, the decline of fundamentally important inventions. So Gordon’s basic hypothesis looks rock solid: there has been a substantial slowdown in productivity growth since the end of the special century in 1970." Really? Energy price hikes have forced capital to adopt much more efficient innovations in all sorts of systems in the energy, transport, production, agricultural and other sectors, surely? Deregulatory neoliberalism was introduced in the 1980s and intensified in the 1990s. In some sectors, services productivity would have soared with the introduction of ICT and internet retail. There are infinite numbers of new inventions, including fundamentally important ones such as the internet since 1970. Can Nordhaus not grapple with another of the 1000 cuts that seems to be the core problem the world economy is facing now, namely the overaccumulation of capital that started to become noticeable in the early 1970s? Apparently not... _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
