Guest Post: Joshua Gans: The University of Toronto May Be Able to Help You...

Reading: Robert Gordon (2014): The Demise of U.S. Economic Growth: Restatement, Rebuttal, and Reflections

Robert Gordon (2014): “The Demise of U.S. Economic Growth: Restatement, Rebuttal, and Reflections”, NBER Working Paper No. 19895 (February) http://www.nber.org/papers/w19895

Five Questions:

  1. What happened around 1880, in Robert Gordon's view?
  2. Why did it happen around 1880--not before and not after?
  3. Why can't we duplicate what happened around 1880 in its essential elements to deliver another century of 2%/year technology-and-organization-frontier productivity growth?
  4. What are the "headwinds" that will push median income growth in the North Atlantic economies well below the 1%-year labor productivity growth that Gordon sees as our likely destiny?
  5. Relative to all past civilizations, we are now so rich as to be approaching what they might have seen as a "singularity" of sorts. How many singularities or near-through has humanity transitioned through? How should we think about economic growth across "singularities" or near-singularities?

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