Robert Gordon

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

Annualized TFP growth in the US was 0.46 percent per year between 1880 and 1920 and 1.89 percent per year between 1920 and 1970. 8 Nicholas Crafts, “Fifty Years of Economic Growth in Western Europe: No Longer Catching Up but Falling Behind?,” World Economics 5, no. 2 (2004): 131–45. 9 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 10 Annualized TFP growth in the US was 1.89 percent per year between 1920 and 1970 and 0.57 between 1970 and 1995; Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 575, figure 17.2. 11 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 575, figure 17.2. Annual TFP growth was 0.40 from 2014 to 2014, even lower than the 0.70 annual TFP growth during the 1973–1994 period and the annual 0.46 TFP growth during the 1890–1920 period. 12 “Total Factor Productivity,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/indicators-data/total-factor-productivity-tfp/. 13 Robert Gordon and Joel Mokyr, “Boom vs.

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Annual TFP growth was 0.40 from 2014 to 2014, even lower than the 0.70 annual TFP growth during the 1973–1994 period and the annual 0.46 TFP growth during the 1890–1920 period. 12 “Total Factor Productivity,” Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, accessed June 19, 2019, https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/indicators-data/total-factor-productivity-tfp/. 13 Robert Gordon and Joel Mokyr, “Boom vs. Doom: Debating the Future of the US Economy,” debate, Chicago Council of Global Affairs, October 31, 2016. 14 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 594–603. 15 Robert Gordon and Joel Mokyr, “Boom vs. Doom: Debating the Future of the US Economy,” debate, Chicago Council of Global Affairs, October 31, 2016. 16 Alvin H. Hansen, “Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth,” American Economic Review 29, no. 1 (1939): 1–15. 17 Angus Maddison, Growth and Interaction in the World Economy: The Roots of Modernity (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2005). 18 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 73, table 2.1.

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Taylor and Harald Uhlig (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2016), 3–69. 3 Angus Maddison, “Historical Statistics of the World Economy: 1-2008 AD,” Groningen Growth and Development Centre: Maddison Project Database (2010). 4 Angus Maddison, “Measuring and Interpreting World Economic Performance 1500–2001,” Review of Income and Wealth 51, no. 1 (2005): 1–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4991.2005.00143.x. 5 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 258. 6 J. Bradford DeLong, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz, “Sustaining U.S. Economic Growth,” in Henry J. Aaron, James M. Lindsay, Pietro S. Nivola, Agenda for the Nation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003), 17–60. 7 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 575, figure 17.2. Annualized TFP growth in the US was 0.46 percent per year between 1880 and 1920 and 1.89 percent per year between 1920 and 1970. 8 Nicholas Crafts, “Fifty Years of Economic Growth in Western Europe: No Longer Catching Up but Falling Behind?

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools
by Steven Brill
Published 15 Aug 2011

THE POL AND THE MONEYMEN Moskowitz City Council hearings: Eva Moskowitz, Randi Weingarten; articles in the New York Times, the Post, and the Daily News. Moskowitz meetings with Petry and Greenblatt: Eva Moskowitz, John Petry, Joel Greenblatt; author also reviewed economic models prepared by Petry. MOUNTING EVIDENCE “Volatility guys” and explanation of research: Thomas Kane, Robert Gordon. Organization of Hamilton Project: Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, Jon Schnur. MORE MONEY, NO HASSLES 2006 negotiation with UFT: Joel Klein, Daniel Weisberg, Randi Weingarten. BUILDING HARLEM SUCCESS Account of opening of Harlem Success: Eva Moskowitz, John Petry, Joel Greenblatt, Jenny Sedlis; newsclips from the New York Times, the Post, and the Daily News ; author’s review of Moskowitz e-mails.

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First word that $100 billion of stimulus was to go for education, including $15 billion for reform plans: Jon Schnur, Heather Higginbottom, Robert Gordon. THE CHOSEN FOUR Clements background and Gates Foundation competition and awards: Jean Clements, David Steele, MaryEllen Elia, Vicki Phillips; Gates Foundation documents. “THEY’LL DO BACKFLIPS” Duncan’s background: Arne Duncan, Peter Cunningham, Jon Schnur. Conference call about stimulus money: Jon Schnur, Heather Higginbottom, Robert Gordon, Arne Duncan. Meetings on Capitol Hill: George Miller, Alice Cain, Jon Schnur, Arne Duncan. Emanuel had remarked at one point: Arne Duncan, Jon Schnur, Rahm Emanuel.

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The Hamilton Project had been conceived by Rubin as a think tank focusing on financial and economic competitiveness issues, and was to be housed within the most establishment center-left think tank in Washington, the Brookings Institution. Because he wanted to provide a policy context, Orszag recruited Robert Gordon, who was working at the Center for American Progress, to become the third author. Gordon, then thirty-four, had graduated from Yale Law School and clerked at the Supreme Court before becoming the domestic issues director for the 2004 presidential campaign of South Carolina Democratic senator John Edwards.

The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market
by Paul de Grauwe and Anna Asbury
Published 12 Mar 2017

Global warming continues unabated. Will the new technologies be ready fast enough to stop the emission of CO? That currently seems very doubtful. There is also a paradox that has been investigated by Robert Gordon of the University of Wisconsin. He comes to the conclusion that  THE L IMI TS OF TH E MAR KET % 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 1891–1972 1972–1996 1996–2013 Figure .. Annual growth in production per hour in the US (in %) Source: Robert Gordon, ‘The Demise of US Economic Growth: Restatement, Rebuttal, and Reflections’, NBER Working Paper 19895 (February 2014) although the digital revolution is important, it is less so than previous technological revolutions, the railways, telegraphy and telephony, the car, and air travel.

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These technological revolutions were at least as intrusive as the digital revolution, if not more so. They changed people’s lives more extensively, and according to Robert Gordon, had a larger effect on growth in productivity than the digital revolution of the s.{ Figure . illustrates some aspects of this, showing average annual growth in productivity (production per hour of labour) in the US since . It is worth noting that the growth in productivity between  and  was around two per cent per year. Since then growth has dropped to less than . per cent per year. So far the digital revolution { See Robert Gordon’s fascinating recent book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ).  T HE U TO PIA OF SE LF - RE GUL ATIO N of the s has had remarkably little observable effect on growth in productivity in the country where it began.

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

The very biosphere is said to groan under the weight of American exceptionalism. And the entire globe runs up against what Malthusian fashion-plate pundits call a World Technological Frontier. All entrepreneurial and technological ventures, according to a canonical paper by the productivity theorist Robert Gordon, face the closing of the world’s “productivity frontier.” In a dismal account of the limits to growth, Gordon foresees productivity’s running into six “headwinds”—demography (slowing of workforce growth), education (diminishing returns of learning as schooling spreads), inequality (with 52 percent of income gains siphoned off to the “One Percent”), globalization (the worldwide reach of U.S. technology pushing down U.S. pay), energy and the environment (“global warming” halting the huge historic growth contributions of fossil fuels), and an overhang of consumer and government debt, perhaps epitomized by the crisis of entitlement liabilities, $120 trillion in the United States alone.2 Such luminaries as the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers sum up the result as “secular stagnation”—a near-permanent retardation of growth.3 The Frenchman Thomas Piketty, demonstrating that not all his countrymen share Alexis de Tocqueville’s admiration of American exceptionalism, has extended the essential argument into a new Marxian “central law of capitalism.”

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Surely, Krugman said, citing Milton Friedman, the unitary gold standard would wreak global havoc like that inflicted by the unitary euro standard.5 So why do we push to end the current monetary regime? The reason is not irrational nostalgia for a misremembered “golden age.” The reason is a decade and a half of economic failure so crippling and pervasive that it has led to a global revulsion against capitalism. Leading economists such as the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and Robert Gordon of the National Bureau of Economic Research have concluded that the world’s economies are entering an era of “secular stagnation,” not merely a cyclical slowdown but a permanent decline of entrepreneurial innovation and technological advance.6 Peter Thiel, by all odds the world’s most visionary venture capitalist–philosopher, has declared that of four possibilities for the world economy—recurrent collapse, plateau, extinction, and technological takeoff—“the hardest one to imagine [is] accelerating takeoff toward a much better future.”7 Deepening the global economic doldrums is a forced transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street so gigantic that it has sharply skewed global measures of the distribution of wealth and income, bringing to a halt fifty years of miraculous and broad-based advances in global living standards.

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For its perpetuation and expansion, the wealth in banks is utterly dependent on long-term investments in perilous processes of learning—real investments in companies and projects that can fail at any time. The role of banks is to transform the savers’ quest for security and liquidity into the entrepreneurs’ necessarily long-term illiquidity and acceptance of risk. Without banks performing this role, economic growth flags and stagnation prevails, as Lawrence Summers and Robert Gordon observe.8 Explaining the sources of Britain’s dominance of world trade, the Victorian journalist Walter Bagehot pointed to the vastly larger agglomerations of capital in London banks: A million in the hands of a single banker is a great power; he can at once lend it where he will, and borrowers can come to him, because they know or believe that he has it.

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise
by Nathan L. Ensmenger
Published 31 Jul 2010

“There is a vast amount of evidence to indicate that writing—a large part of programming is writing after all, albeit in a special language for a very restricted audience—can be planned, scheduled and controlled, nearly all of which has been flagrantly ignored by both programmers and their managers,” argued Robert Gordon in 1968 in a review of contemporary software development practices.103 Although it was admittedly true “that programming a computer is more an art than a science, that in some of its aspects it is a creative process,” this new perspective on software management suggested that “as a matter of fact, a modicum of intelligent effort can provide a very satisfactory degree of control.”104 It was the NATO Conference on Software Engineering in 1968 that irrevocably established software management as one of the central rhetorical cornerstones of all future debates about the nature and causes of the software crisis.

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Ben Shneiderman, “The Relationship between COBOL and Computer Science,” Annals of the History of Computing 7, no. 4 (1985): 350. 43. Ibid., 351. 44. John Golda, “The Effects of Computer Technology on the Traditional Role of Management” (master’s thesis, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, 1965), 34, 85; Robert Gordon, “Personnel Selection,” in Data Processing, Practically Speaking (1967), 34, 85. 45. Alan Perlis, cited in Wexelblat, History of Programming Languages, 60. 46. Alan Perlis, cited in ibid., 82. 47. “Angels, Pins, and Language Standards,” Datamation 9, no. 4 (1963): 23–25. 48. Jack Little, cited in RAND Symposium, “On Programming Languages, Part II,” 29–30. 49.

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Editorial, “The Facts of Life,” Datamation 14, no. 3 (1968): 21. 48. Hal Sackman, W. J. Erickson, and E. E. Grant, “Exploratory Experimental Studies Comparing Online and Offline Programming Performance,” Communications of the ACM 11, no. 1 (1968): 3–11. 49. Edwin E. David, cited in Randall and Buxton, Software Engineering, 33. 50. Robert Gordon, “Personnel Selection,” in Data Processing, Practically Speaking, ed. Stanley Naftaly and Fred Gruenberger (Los Angeles: Data Processing Digest, 1967), 88. 51. Joseph O’Shields, “Selection of EDP Personnel,” Personnel Journal 44, no. 9 (1965): 472. 52. Perry and Cannon, “Vocational Interests of Computer Programmers.” 53.

The Making of a World City: London 1991 to 2021
by Greg Clark
Published 31 Dec 2014

Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Cover image: City Hall, Southwark, London, UK. Courtesy of mbbirdy / iStock Photo Cover design: Sophie Ford, www.hisandhersdesign.co.uk Set in 9.5/12pt TrumpMediaeval by Aptara Inc., New Delhi, India 1 2015 Contents About the Author Foreword by Martin Simmons Preface by Rosemary Feenan and Robert Gordon Clark Acknowledgements ix xi xiii xv Section I London in 1991 – Setting the scene 1 Introduction: Honor Chapman and London: World City 2 London prior to 1991: The back story 3 11 Planning for a new world city 12 The rise of finance and a new rationale for post-industrial London 13 A hiatus of government 16 The LDDC and a new era of pragmatism 16 3 The 1991 London: World City report and its message about London 19 Old rivals, new rivals 22 An agenda for metropolitan governance 24 Brand new: The promotion of London 26 The future knowledge economy 29 Section II The evolution of London, 1991 to 2015 4 The internationalisation of London’s economy 35 Internationalisation of London’s labour force 39 The global financial crisis and after 43 5 Leadership, governance and policy 47 1997 and a new direction for metropolitan government 52 The London Plan: A global city strategy 56 London boroughs 59 Promoting London 60 London’s governance today 66 vi Contents 6 Re-investment and urban regeneration 69 Cultural revitalisation of the South Bank: Lambeth, Southwark and Greenwich 72 New regeneration powers from 2000 74 Regeneration in perspective 77 From de-industrial to post-industrial: Building a new experience for markets, leisure and commerce 80 7 Corporate hub, office market and real estate 87 The rise and rise of tall buildings 88 The diffusion of London’s office geography 89 The transformative impact of foreign capital 93 8 Homes and housing in London 99 Consensus but complacency in the 1990s 100 The London Plan and a new agenda for housing 101 London’s housing predicament: Prospects and solutions 107 9 London’s evolving infrastructure platform 111 The impact of TfL and citywide government on transport 113 From incrementalism to integration?

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She would have read this with satisfaction to see many of her recommendations even now retaining their sense and impact, with frustration at the lack of progress in some areas, and with gratitude that Greg Clark has reset the benchmark on helping the world’s leaders understand what it takes to be a successful city. Rosemary Feenan Jones Lang LaSalle Robert Gordon Clark London Communications Agency Acknowledgements In 2012, London announced itself as the capital of the 21st century world of cities. The phenomenal success of its Olympic Games marked a high watermark after two decades of evolution and transformation during which London had become one of the most open and cosmopolitan cities in the world, whilst increasing its formal influence and soft power in the global systems of capital, culture, knowledge, and communications.

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I am very grateful to The City of London, London First, London School of Economics, Centre for London, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Cities Policy Unit at the Cabinet Office, Department for Communities and Local Government, Greater London Authority, London & Partners, the Urban Land Institute and Centre for Cities, and to the following individuals who contributed their thoughts and comments: Lord Andrew Adonis, Stephen Aldridge, Peter Bill, Richard Blakeway, Gerry Blundell, Mark Boleat, Robin Broadhurst CBE, Professor Ricky Burdett, Andrew Campling, Andrew Carter, Michael Cassidy CBE, Professor Paul Cheshire, Simon Clark, Paul Clark, Andrew Cooke, Toby Courtauld, Philip Cox, Sunny Crouch, Howard Dawber, Richard Dickenson, John Dickie, Sarah Elliott, Professor Michael Enright, Miatta Fahnbulleh, Professor Susan Fainstein, Sir Terry Farrell, Rosemary Feenan, Dr Vincent Fouchier, Dr Vincent Gollain, Professor Ian Gordon, Robert Gordon Clark, Dr Andrew Gould, Sir Malcolm Grant, Rob Harris, Ian Hawksworth, Edwin Heathcote, Dr Helen Hill, Dr Peter Hobbs, Will Hutton, Gordon Innes, Sir Simon xvi Acknowledgements Jenkins, Christopher Jonas CBE, Alexandra Jones, Bruce Katz, Professor Mark Kleinman, Dr Takayuki Kubo, Wally Kumar, Sir Stuart Lipton, Sir Edward Lister, David Lunts, Dame Judith Mayhew Jonas, Harvey McGrath, Paul McNamara, Liz Meek CBE, Joe Montgomery, Martin Moore, Dr Mike More, Jeremy Newsum, Sir Stephen O’Brien CBE, Sir Michael Pickard, Merrill Pond, Nigel Roberts, Ben Rogers, Lord Rogers of Riverside, Sir Peter Rogers, Bridget Rosewell OBE, Judith Salomon, Francis Salway, Professor Rosemary Scanlon, Jos Short, David Simmonds, Martin Simmons, Jeremy Skinner, Eric Sorensen, Colin Stanbridge, Dr Lui Thai Ker, Professor Tony Travers, Peter Vernon, Michael Ward, Professor Carl Weisbrod, Robert Whitehead, Adrian Wyatt OBE, Peter Wynne Rees and Professor Bob Yaro.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

No American had a landline telephone in 1880; 28 percent had one in 1914, 62 percent in 1950, and 87 percent in 1970. Eighteen percent of Americans had electric power in 1913; 94 percent had it by 1950.6 The arrival of these wonders of convenience and consumption is often called a “second industrial revolution.” The economist Robert Gordon wrote of “one big wave” consisting of everything from flush toilets to microwave ovens, after which the low- and even the moderate-hanging fruit of organic chemicals, internal combustion engines, and electric power had been picked and technology was bound to slow. For him, the steady progress of science happened to suddenly bring us to a place extraordinarily rich in technological potential.

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Worldwide steel production would rise from trivial amounts—enough for swords, some cutlery, and a few tools that needed the sharpest attainable edge—to some 70 million tons a year by 1914.8 By 1950 this would grow to 170 million tons, and as of 2020 it is 1.5 billion tons a year. As of 2016, steel cost about $500 per ton, and the average North Atlantic full-time wage was nearly $50,000 per year. But it was not just steel. Robert Gordon was 100 percent right when he wrote that the year 1870 was the dawn of something new in the world, for over the next several decades, “every aspect of life experienced a revolution. By 1929, urban America [had] electricity, natural gas, [the] telephone, [and] clean running water[,]… the horse had almost vanished from urban streets[,]… [and] the household… enjoy[ed] entertainment[s]… beyond the 1870 imagination.”9 From the railroad and the steel mill as the high-tech edge of the economy in 1870, to the dynamo and the motor car as the high-tech edge in 1903, to the assembly line and the aircraft of 1936, to the television set and rocket (both moon and military) of 1969, to the microprocessor and World Wide Web of 2002—technological revolution, with its economic and then its sociological and political consequences, problems, and adjustments, came faster and more furiously than in any previous age.

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But when people look back on the past half decade or so and see that there has been an excess supply of money during that time, they will expect inflation in the years ahead. This can become doubly damning. The price level will jump in part as expected and in part as unexpected. And the total inflation rate—expected plus unexpected—will accelerate upward. The sharp rise in inflation came as a surprise to the Johnson administration. Macroeconomist Robert Gordon later reminisced on the analytical framework that had been reliable before and that they had been using, saying it “collapsed with amazing speed after 1967.” He and his economist peers, who had recently all obtained their graduate degrees and started their first jobs, “were acutely aware of the timing of this turn of the tide,… and almost immediately found our graduate school education incapable of explaining the evolution of the economy.”18 Economic advisers to both Johnson and, before him, President John F.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

As Harry Jerome wrote, “If letters were all written by hand, and computations all made by laborious and expensive human effort, there would be a marked shrinkage in the volume of correspondence and computation considered necessary and economical.”27 In other words, machines were responsible for relieving workers of the most dangerous and physically demanding tasks as well as for creating new and more pleasant ones in electrified factories and air-conditioned offices. Economist Robert Gordon has calculated that the share of the workforce engaged in jobs that can be deemed physically challenging and dangerous fell from 63.1 in 1870 to 9.0 percent in 1970.28 Of course, such estimates inevitably understate the demise of unpleasant work because the content of many unpleasant jobs changed for the better as well.

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As Robert Putnam’s colorful descriptions of life in Port Clinton in the 1950s illustrate, “The children of manual workers and of professionals came from similar homes and mixed unselfconsciously in schools and neighborhoods, in scout troops and church groups.… Everyone knew everyone else’s first name.”18 Port Clinton was not an exception in this regard. At that time, manual workmen and their families could live on the same street as a white-collar family. Such middle-class living provided the foundation for middle-class politics. Robert Gordon explains: This rough economic equality was a political fact of the first importance. It meant that, in a break with the drift of things in pre-war America, postwar America had no working class and no working-class politics. It instead had a middle-class politics for an expanding middle class bigger in aspiration and self-identification than it was in fact—more people wanted to be seen as middle-class than had yet arrived at that state of felicity.

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As we have seen in the preceding chapters, replacing technologies are likely to be resisted if workers face poor alternative options—an issue to which we shall return. * * * All human performers of transportation and delivery tasks are not at immediate risk from the rise of autonomous vehicles, of course. As AI skeptics like Robert Gordon have pointed out, even if “the car drives up in front of my house, how does the package get from the Amazon car to my front porch? Who carries it up when I’m away from home?”33 At the same time, we have been able to overcome seemingly more complicated engineering problems in the past through clever task redesign.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
by Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 23 Jan 2012

Davis, Jason Faberman, and John Haltiwanger found that recruiting intensity per job opening has plummeted during the past decade as well. Employers just don’t seem to have the same demand for labor that they once did. This reflects a pattern that was noticeable in the “jobless recovery” of the early 1990s, but that has worsened after each of the two recessions since then. Economists Menzie Chinn and Robert Gordon, in separate analyses, find that the venerable relationship between output and employment known as Okun’s Law has been amended. Historically, increased output meant increased employment, but the recent recovery created much less employment than predicted; GDP rebounded but jobs didn't. The historically strong relationship between changes in GDP and changes in employment appears to have weakened as digital technology has become more pervasive and powerful.

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We are grateful for conversations on technology and employment with our MIT colleagues, including Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Frank Levy, Tod Loofbourrow, Thomas Malone, Stuart Madnick, Wanda Orlikowski, Michael Schrage, Peter Weill, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger. In addition, Rob Atkinson, Yannis Bakos, Susanto Basu, Menzie Chinn, Robert Gordon, Lorin Hitt, Rob Huckman, Michael Mandel, Dan Snow, Zeynep Ton and Marshall van Alstyne were very generous with their insights. We also benefited greatly from talking with people in industry who are making and using incredible technologies, including Rod Brooks, Paul Hofmann Ray Kurzweil, Ike Nassi, and Hal Varian.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

Once the gods favoured us, but their favour has now been withdrawn, and we find it difficult to restore the golden age of prosperity. Some economic explanations for the current productivity downturn pin the blame on exogenous events. The influential narratives of growth slowdown by Tyler Cowen (The Great Stagnation) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth) fit into this time-honoured tradition.23 Both argue that a range of headwinds meant that growth, both from technological progress and from human factors such as improvements in education, had slowed down; Gordon in particular remains pessimistic that it will speed up again in the future.

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We explore those aspects next. The Conventional Explanations: Some Doubts There is no one cause of slow growth. For this reason, the explanations we set out above are unlikely to tell the whole story. Technology: Is Growth Over? The fall in productivity over the very long term, as documented by Robert Gordon, is compelling (see again figure 1.7). That said, the economist Dan Sichel has reminded us that neither economists nor technologists are very good at predicting the future.29 Part of the difficulty is knowing to what purpose technology might be put. Joel Mokyr has advanced the view that perhaps the growth impact of ICT on health via personalised medicine, gene therapy, and other technologies is yet to play out because these areas have so much promise but are very hard to apply new technology to.30 Technology has not yet lost its ability to surprise us for the better: early in 2020 many wondered if a COVID-19 vaccine would be years off.

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These three effects would combine to produce exactly the effect that we see: lower TFP in an economy in which intangible investment is abundant but growing slowly. The intangible explanation for slow productivity growth is consistent with other findings about slowing productivity growth. It helps explain the concerns about slowing technological progress voiced by Robert Gordon, Tyler Cowen, and Erik Brynjolfsson, providing an underlying explanation for why this slowing should be happening now. It is also consistent with two explanations of declining TFP made by Dietrich Vollrath in his book Fully Grown. Vollrath points out that a significant fraction of the fall in US TFP between 2000 and 2016 is explained by lower business dynamism (the fact that productive small businesses grow and replace incumbents less quickly) and by the long-term shift from manufacturing (where TFP growth has historically been high) to services (where TFP growth has historically been lower).4 Both of these causes have an intangible angle: lower business dynamism relates to the growing leader/laggard gap that intangibles are exacerbating.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

After a period of rapid expansion, economic growth in the large advanced countries, with the occasional exception of the United States, has slowed to a rate no more than half that of a generation ago.14 Gains in productivity in the last decade were barely half those in the previous decade and barely one-fourth the average increases between 1920 and 1970. The economist Robert Gordon notes that the newest wave of technology, while dramatically changing how we communicate and get information, has done very little to improve the material conditions of life, particularly in housing and transportation.15 The slowdown of population growth, especially in high-income countries, is another aspect of societal stagnation.

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Katz, “The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States, 1890 to 1940,” National Bureau of Economic Research, April 1998, https://www.nber.org/papers/w6537.pdf. 7 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 217–22; Erin Duffin, “U.S. college enrollment statistics for public and private colleges from 1965 to 2016 and projections up to 2028,” Statista, August 9, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/. 8 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 513, 521. 9 Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Tertiary Education,” Our World in Data, 2019, https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education; Angel Calderon, “The higher education landscape is changing fast,” University World News, June 22, 2018, http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?

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Kight, “Young Americans are embracing socialism,” Axios, March 10, 2019, https://www.axios.com/exclusive-poll-young-americans-embracing-socialism-b051907a-87a8-4f61-9e6e-0db75f7edc4a.html. 11 Stokes, “Public divided on prospects for the next generation.” 12 “India fares worst among developing countries in World Bank study on upward mobility,” Business Today, June 5, 2018, https://www.businesstoday.in/current/world/india-developing-countries-world-bank-upward-mobility-study/story/278455.html. 13 Bruce Stokes and Kat Devlin, “Despite Rising Economic Confidence, Japanese See Best Days Behind Them and Say Children Face a Bleak Future,” Pew Research Center, November 12, 2018, http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/11/12/despite-rising-economic-confidence-japanese-see-best-days-behind-them-and-say-children-face-a-bleak-future/. 14 Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 106. 15 Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg, “‘Playing Catch-Up in the Game of Life.’ Millennials Approach Middle Age in Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/playing-catch-up-in-the-game-of-life-millennials-approach-middle-age-in-crisis-11558290908. 16 John Daley and Brendan Coates, “Housing Affordability: Re-imagining the Australian Dream,” Grattan Institute, March 2018, https://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/901-Housing-affordability.pdf; Leith Van Onselen, “The sad death of Australian home ownership.”

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

Unlike the years of more than 6 percent growth spurred by twentieth-century innovation cycles (electricity, communication, transportation), the digital revolution is delivering less than 2 percent growth and increasing inequality in the developed world. As economist Paul Krugman notes, reviewing Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, “Gordon suggests that the future is all too likely to be marked by stagnant living standards for most Americans, because the effects of slowing technological progress will be reinforced by a set of ‘headwinds’: rising inequality, a plateau in education levels, an aging population and more.”

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One possibility for this anomaly is that the entrepreneurs heading these firms have most of their wealth in the stock of their companies and they would rather use the cash to support the stock (through buybacks) than make long-term investments, which might take years to show results. The second question we need to ask is posed by the economist Robert Gordon in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon argues that the hype around the technology revolution is overdone and that digital services are less important to productivity than any one of the five great inventions that drove economic growth before 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, and telecommunications.

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This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what happened to our democracy. Robert McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2015). This is a really good primer from a media activist and scholar who has been fighting media monopoly for twenty-five years. Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). This is the great antidote to digital utopians. Gordon’s well-researched text shows that the Internet has not been the productivity bounty that was promised. Sara C. Kingsley, Mary L. Gray, and Siddharth Suri, “Monopsony and the Crowd: Labor for Lemons?”

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
by Derek Thompson
Published 7 Feb 2017

In the century between the 1870s and 1970s, the United States underwent an industrial revolution in food (the invention of the refrigerator), light (the mainstreaming of electricity), travel (the triumph of the automobile and the airplane), and even in the anatomy of homes, with the modernization of gas, sewers, and running water. As the economic historian Robert Gordon has argued cleverly, a time traveler visiting a 1970s house would feel quite at home in its kitchen, bathroom, living room, or bedroom. But if this decade-hopper wanted to watch cable on a giant flat-screen television, or stream music from a million-song library, or look up something on the Internet, he would feel lost.

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Thank you to the wonderful team at Penguin Press: Virginia, Scott, Annie, Ann, and the whole publicity and marketing squad. Thanks to those whose work inspired this book, directly and implicitly: Raymond Loewy, Stanley Lieberson, Michael Kaminiski, Chris Taylor, Bill Bryson, Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Berger, Steven Johnson, Tom Vanderbilt, Robert Gordon, David Suisman, Paul Barber, Elizabeth Margulis, John Seabrook, Charles Duhigg, Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Michael Wolff, Nate Silver, Dan Ariely, Jonathan Franzen, Conor Sen, Felix Salmon, Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Chris Martin, Marc Andreessen, and Umberto Eco. Thanks to those whose conversations inspired this book, directly and implicitly: Drew Durbin, Lincoln Quirk, Michael Diamond, Jordan Weissmann, Robbie dePicciotto, Laura Martin, Maria Konnikova, Mark Harris, Spencer Kornhaber, Rececca Rosen, Alexis Madrigal, Bob Cohn, John Gould, Don Peck, James Bennet, Kevin Roose, Gabriel Rossman, Jesse Prinz, Duncan Watts, Anne Messitte, Andrew Golis, Aditya Sood, Nicholas Jackson, Seth Godin, the Diamonds, the Durbins, and Kira Thompson.

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twenty-five thousand people downloaded the app: Kara Swisher, “The Money Shot,” Vanity Fair, June 2013. movie industry was the third-largest retail business: Edward Jay Epstein, The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 2005), 6. more than five hours watching: Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). fell from about twenty-five in 1950 to four in 2015: Barak Y. Orbach and Liran Einav, “Uniform Prices for Differentiated Goods: The Case of the Movie-Theater Industry,” International Review of Law and Economics 27 (2007): 129–53.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
by Jason Fagone
Published 25 Sep 2017

Elizebeth’s first two successful hires were Hyman Hurwitz, a twenty-one-year-old electrical engineer from Dorchester, Massachusetts, who liked to tinker with radios, and thirty-one-year-old Vernon Cooley, from Kalamazoo, Michigan, who had taught schoolchildren there and also worked for a time in the factory of the Kalamazoo Paper Company. Both were given the title of Assistant Cryptographic Clerk. A third young codebreaker-in-training soon joined them, Robert Gordon, who was twenty-three and hailed from Waco, Texas. The three men, “able, agreeable, and cooperative,” treated Elizebeth with respect, and soon they all settled into a productive routine, learning each other’s quirks and strengths, dividing up tasks as a team. Asking if Elizebeth experienced sexism was like asking if Marie Curie did.

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He was a man on the verge of mental breakdown, writing a letter to his wife, who was also close to collapse, at a moment when the world was rearranging itself, and they would both have to give more of themselves than they had ever given before. “The ocean,” he said, “is as calm as a bowl of warm milk sitting on a table.” PART III THE INVISIBLE WAR 1939–1945 CHAPTER 1 Grandmother Died Elizebeth Friedman, U.S. Coast Guard Cryptanalyst-in-Charge, and a junior cryptanalyst, Robert Gordon, puzzling out a problem together, 1940. (George C. Marshall Research Foundation) Lights out ’cause I can see in the dark . . . —FUGAZI The Second World War did not begin with a gunshot or a bomb. It began with a feat of deception involving elements long familiar to Elizebeth Friedman—a code phrase, a radio station, and a murder.

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The basic rhythm of her typical weekdays had not changed since the early ’30s. She was still working in her coast guard office at the Treasury Annex building near the White House, serving as chief of the Cryptanalytic Unit that she had founded in 1931 and nurtured ever since. Her three junior codebreakers, Robert Gordon, Vernon Cooley, and Hyman Hurwitz, the ones she had originally recruited and trained, were still with her, and a handful of women clerk-typists had also joined the team as support staff. Elizebeth, Gordon, Cooley, and Hurwitz often worked together at a long table in the office, analyzing the ever-replenishing piles of cryptograms that arrived from the coast guard listening stations, chewing the ends of their pencils, maps of the world pinned to the wall behind them, the clack of the clerks’ typewriters filling the room.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

In Europe, economists at the London School of Economics and the OECD have been valuable sources for our work, not the least on trade, wages, inequality, and productivity. There is plenty of interesting research on digital innovation and how it is reshaping some markets and economies. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and their colleagues at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Center for Digital Business deserve a particular mention. Likewise, Robert Gordon’s stellar work on productivity and American prosperity – in some ways the antithesis to Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s work – has given us an extraordinary number of insights. Throughout the work on this book we have been reminded of the significance of many classical or political economists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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For advanced economies, labor productivity has been more volatile than TFP growth, surging in the US during the boom in information and communications technology (ICT) in the second half of the 1990s. But that spurt, which promised a lasting digital shock to the US economy, proved to be just that – a spurt. Economist Robert Gordon has a sobering view for those who think past and future rates of US labor productivity growth are impressive. He has recently become known for swearing in the church of the New Machine Age by suggesting that the role of innovation for US growth is underwhelming and that it will not get much better.

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In their otherwise important book The Second Machine Age, they claim that “part of the recent slowdown simply reflects the Great Recession and its aftermath.”35 They argue that US productivity growth “in the decade following the year 2000 exceeded even the high growth rates of the roaring 1990s, which in turn was higher than 1970s or 1980s growth rates had been.”36 These propositions do not stand up to scrutiny. Since 1970 there has been one productivity spurt, but otherwise there has been a downward trend. Robert Gordon dates the productivity spurt to the period between 1996 and 2004, and other experts on US productivity agree. It thus ended before the credit boom and bust that took place between 2005 and 2010.37 Consequently, the US economy was showing a declining trend in productivity growth before the Great Recession, and the pattern after 2010 was no different from that before the crisis.

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010
by T M Devine
Published 25 Aug 2011

The success of these ethnic communities was demonstrated by the rise of the twelve ‘Scottish Brotherhoods’, each organized by an elected committee of ‘Elders’ drawn from all the Scottish ‘colonies’. It was also confirmed by the ascent of a few Scots to positions of real power in Poland. Perhaps the most famous was Alexander Chalmer (Czamer), born in Dyce near Aberdeen, who made his pile in textiles and then served four terms as Mayor of Warsaw. Some, like Robert Gordon, a wealthy Danzig merchant who endowed Robert Gordon’s College at Aberdeen, invested some of their riches back home. Yet others entered the ranks of the Polish nobility. But these were not the typical Scots. The majority were packmen, plying their trade on horseback, selling cheap household wares into the remotest parts of the country.68 This commercial experience in Europe provides one explanation for Scottish economic success in the eighteenth-century empire.

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The proprietors envisaged a colony of landed estates, and among those who eventually emigrated to the New World were a very high proportion of younger sons of the north-east gentry. Thus, three members of the Gordons of Straloch purchased proprietary shares, but only the two younger bothers actually travelled to the colony. Several other emigrants can be identified as sons of minor, cadet branches of landed families. Robert Gordon of Cluny probably spoke for many of his fellow proprietors when he stated that his own reason for being attracted to the project of colonization was to provide land for his younger son, ‘since I had not estate whereby to make him a Scotch laird’.9 But perhaps even more acute pressures were building up by the early eighteenth century.

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Many were in the employ of the two dominant Scots trading houses in Liverpool – Samuel McDougal of Wigton (later a pre-eminent opponent of abolition) and the Tod brothers from Moffat.16 Scots were equally prominent in Bristol. One of the most powerful merchant dynasties in the north of Scotland, the Baillies of Dochfour, near Inverness, was partially founded on slave trafficking from Bristol.17 Robert Gordon from Moray was among the owners who managed ten or more slave-trading vessels in the city and between 1745 and 1769 profited from eighteen different voyages to East Africa.18 It was in London, however, that the Scots really made their mark. Around one in ten of the African traders in the capital were Scots in the early 1750s, a number which increased in later decades.19 They were similarly heavily involved in the governance of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa as elected members of the Company’s committee of management.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

In fact, in a list of all the candidates for this classification compiled by the economist Alexander Field, only steam power got more votes than ICT, which was tied with electricity as the second most commonly accepted GPT.9 If we are all in agreement, then why the debate over whether ICTs are ushering in a new golden age of innovation and growth? Because, the argument goes, their economic benefits have already been captured and now most new ‘innovation’ involves entertaining ourselves inexpensively online. According to Robert Gordon: The first industrial robot was introduced by General Motors in 1961. Telephone operators went away in the 1960s. . . . Airline reservations systems came in the 1970s, and by 1980 bar-code scanners and cash machines were spreading through the retail and banking industries. . . . The first personal computers arrived in the early 1980s with their word processing, word wrap, and spreadsheets. . . .

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There have even been substantial increases in the number of stock keeping units (SKUs) in most physical stores as computerized inventory management systems, supply chains, and manufacturing have become more efficient and flexible. For the overall economy, the official GDP numbers miss the value of new goods and services added to the tune of about 0.4 percent of additional growth each year, according to economist Robert Gordon.* Remember that productivity growth has been in the neighborhood of 2 percent per year for most of the past century, so contribution of new goods is not a trivial portion. Reputations and Recommendations Digitization also brings a related but subtler benefit to the vast array of goods and services that already exist in the economy.

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As part of this work, we talked to two main types of geek (a label which, to us, is the highest praise): those who study economics and other social sciences, and those who build technologies. In the former group Susan Athey, David Autor, Zoe Baird, Nick Bloom, Tyler Cowen, Charles Fadel, Chrystia Freeland, Robert Gordon, Tom Kalil, Larry Katz, Tom Kochan, Frank Levy, James Manyika, Richard Murnane, Robert Putnam, Paul Romer, Scott Stern, Larry Summers, and Hal Varian have helped our thinking enormously. In the latter category are Chris Anderson, Rod Brooks, Peter Diamandis, Ephraim Heller, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Howard, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, John Leonard, Tod Loofbourrow, Hilary Mason, Tim O’Reilly, Sandy Pentland, Brad Templeton, and Vivek Wadhwa.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Between 1900 and 1992, global GDP grew from US$1.98 trillion to around US$28 trillion, a growth rate of just under 3 percent per annum. Between 1992 and 2014, it doubled again to US$60 trillion, a growth rate of around 3.5 percent per annum. The average human being today has about nine times and four times the income per head of their predecessors in 1500 and 1900 respectively.5 Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon confirmed McNeill's results. Using British data, he found minimal growth in real output per capita, 0.2 percent per annum, between 1300 and 1700. By 1906 British growth reached around 1 percent per annum. According to later US data, growth reached around 2.5 percent per annum by 1950, then declined.

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In 2015, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that, without labor productivity increases to offset the effects of aging populations and declining birthrates, it is conceivable that there will be a 40 percent drop in GDP growth rates and a 20 percent drop in the growth rate of per capita income globally.8 Innovation too may be flagging. Economist Robert Gordon identified three phases of innovation.9 Industrial revolution 1 (1750–1830) focused on coal, steam engines, railroads, and textiles. Industrial revolution 2 (1870–1900) saw five key innovations: electricity; the internal combustion engine; running water, indoor plumbing, and central heating; rearranging molecules central to petroleum, chemicals, plastics, and pharmaceuticals; and communication and entertainment devices such as the telephone, the phonograph, popular photography, radio, and motion pictures.

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In 1955, showing off a new, automatically operated plant, a Ford company executive asked United Automobile Workers head Walter Reuther, “How are you going to collect union dues from [the robots]?” Reuther countered, “And how are you going to get them to buy Fords?”17 Economic expansion is not a continuous process that can persist forever. Growth and improvements in living standards will slow significantly. For “shock value,” economist Robert Gordon speculates that future US growth rates, adjusted for his six headwinds (demographics, declining educational attainments, rising inequality, the effects of globalization, environmental costs, and the debt overhang) may be 0.2 percent, well below even the modest 1.8 percent of 1987–2007. Low or no growth is not necessarily a problem.

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success
by Dietrich Vollrath
Published 6 Jan 2020

This goes back to graduate school, where my advisers Oded Galor, Peter Howitt, and David Weil impressed on me the value of taking a long-run view. That was reinforced over time by interactions—electronic or in person—with Areendam Chanda, German Cubas, David Cuberes, Carl-Johan Dalgaard, Ryan Decker, Markus Eberhardt, Lennart Erickson, Jim Feyrer, Doug Gollin, Robert Gordon, Mike Hsu, Greg Ip, Remi Jedwab, Mike Jerzmanowski, Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, Jenny Minier, Chris Papageorgiou, David Papell, Noah Smith, Bent Sorensen, Liliana Varela, and Kei-mu Yi. Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, and Brad DeLong all deserve a special mention, as they were willing to read an original draft of this book and offered a series of thoughtful comments and criticisms.

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But while economic growth was positive in every year since 2010, it struggled to crack 2% on an annual basis, meaning that the economy remained well below the trend established before the financial crisis. It’s like we decided to stick to fifty-five miles per hour after getting free of the roadwork. This growth slowdown has not escaped the attention of, well, anyone with even a passing interest in economics. Robert Gordon’s recent history of economic growth in the United States is entitled The Rise and Fall of American Growth, not The Rise and Continued Pretty Good Rate of American Growth. You can find multiple stories on slow economic growth in past issues of the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Financial Times, just to name a few.

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One common worry is that the growth slowdown reflects a failure of ingenuity or innovation. We hear this in complaints that the things we do invent are frivolous or trivial, as in PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s famous quotation “We wanted flying cars, and all we got was 140 characters,” or in some of Robert Gordon’s analysis in his recent book. At the same time, techno-optimists say we are in the middle of an unprecedented explosion in technological creativity, often associated with the massive increase in computing power available to firms and researchers, and the possibilities of artificial intelligence and robotics.

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
by Morgan Housel
Published 7 Sep 2020

Despite sitting quietly most of the day in what might have looked like free time or leisure hours to most people, he was constantly working in his mind, thinking problems through. This was unique in his day. Almost all jobs during Rockefeller’s time required doing things with your hands. In 1870, 46% of jobs were in agriculture, and 35% were in crafts or manufacturing, according to economist Robert Gordon. Few professions relied on a worker’s brain. You didn’t think; you labored, without interruption, and your work was visible and tangible. Today, that’s flipped. Thirty-eight percent of jobs are now designated as “managers, officials, and professionals.” These are decision-making jobs. Another 41% are service jobs that often rely on your thoughts as much as your actions.

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Savings in the bank that earn 0% interest might actually generate an extraordinary return if they give you the flexibility to take a job with a lower salary but more purpose, or wait for investment opportunities that come when those without flexibility turn desperate. And that hidden return is becoming more important. The world used to be hyper-local. Just over 100 years ago 75% of Americans had neither telephones nor regular mail service, according to historian Robert Gordon. That made competition hyper-local. A worker with just average intelligence might be the best in their town, and they got treated like the best because they didn’t have to compete with the smarter worker in another town. That’s now changed. A hyper-connected world means the talent pool you compete in has gone from hundreds or thousands spanning your town to millions or billions spanning the globe.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Uncle Sam provided the arsenal of democracy that saved the twentieth century from ruin. This is a remarkable story. But it is also a story with a sting in the tail: today, productivity growth has all but stalled. Tyler Cowen has talked about a “great stagnation.” Lawrence Summers has revived Alvin Hansen’s phrase, “secular stagnation.” Robert Gordon’s study of the American economy since the Civil War is called The Rise and Fall of American Growth. America is being defeated by China and other rising powers in one industry after another. The number of new companies being created has reached a modern low. The labor market is becoming stickier.

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Howard Mason Gore, the secretary of agriculture, introduced more order into the emerging national system when he approved a uniform system of numbering and marking highways in 1925: east-west roads were assigned even numbers, north-south roads odd numbers, and transcontinental highways were designed in multiples of ten. Road builders developed asphalt and concrete for road surfaces. The first road atlas to report on the condition of specific routes was introduced in 1926.11 Robert Gordon estimates that the development of a nationwide network of paved roads increased the speed of automobile travel by a factor of at least five between 1905 and 1920.12 America also began to add the air to its transportation routes. The commercial aircraft industry was slow to get off the ground because flying was so dangerous.

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The GI Bill provided returning veterans with a wide range of government services, such as low-cost mortgages (which helped to spark the construction boom) and education subsidies (which turned America into a world leader in the proportion of young people who went to college). In recent decades, as Robert Gordon has pointed out, productivity growth has been concentrated in a narrow range of economic activities—entertainment, communications, and IT. In the postwar years, people experienced rapid improvement in almost every aspect of their lives—housing, education, transportation, health care, and working conditions.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

Today’s era of precarious employment featuring suddenly disposable employees was arriving, as explained in detail by economists such as Truman Bewley of Yale University.33 Firms became increasingly inclined in slowdowns to reduce employment rather than to hoard skilled employees. In fact, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon concluded companies utilize downturns to boost profits by cutting 1.27 times more employees than justified by the decline in demand. Here is how Gordon described this new environment of what he termed “savage cost cutting”: “The intensity of cost-cutting reflected the interplay between executive compensation, the stock market, and corporate profits….

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Looking ahead, the Apple business model promises more stagnation and more family economic distress. The US business community is offshoring too many high-productivity jobs, exporting the source of traditional US growth. That compounds the drain on productivity from short-termism. And that’s why economists such as Robert Gordon, Jeremy Grantham, and experts at the Congressional Budget Office in 2012 downgraded your future.4 Recall that Gordon concluded that American productivity growth in the future will average a bare 1 percent: “Future growth in real GDP per capita will be slower than in any extended period since the late nineteenth century, and growth in real consumption per capita for the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution will be even slower than that.”5 The antigrowth aspects of Reaganomics have caused an enduring downshift in the potential growth rate of America.

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Liveris argues that policy reforms are needed to end the decline: “At a time when US companies—run by patriotic people—are moving offshore at the fastest rate in history, we should, at a minimum, recognize that the model we are relying on isn’t working.”34 The erosion of American dynamism in manufacturing and in high-value services like computer design means new jobs are being concentrated in less-remunerative services where productivity growth tends to be weaker. These trends lend support to Robert Gordon and the Congressional Budget Office’s unsettling prognoses of slow growth in the years ahead. To create more high-productivity jobs, America needs new jobs in high-value services, in the innovation industry including Hollywood and especially in manufacturing where productivity growth is most promising and multiplier effects large.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

Meanwhile, remind yourselves of the impact manufacturing job losses have had on Western politics. Way more than half of Trump’s voters were male. The same applies to the Brexit electorate. As the baseball legend Yogi Berra allegedly said, it is tough to make predictions – especially about the future. The economist Robert Gordon clearly wasn’t listening. His book The Rise and Fall of American Growth makes a startling forecast that did not go down well in Silicon Valley. The future is not what it used to be, he says. The peak age of high growth and disruptive technology is behind us. Forget the power of the iPhone. Stop exulting about Google’s driverless car.

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(essay), 5, 14, 181 Garten, Jeffrey, From Silk to Silicon, 25 Gates, Bob, 177–8 gay marriage issue, 187, 188 gender, 57 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 72 Genghis Khan, 25 gentrification, creeping, 46, 48, 50–1 Georgia, Rose Revolution (2003), 79 Germany, 15, 42, 43, 57, 78, 115; far-right resurgence in, 139–40; and future of EU, 180; Nazi, 116, 117, 155, 171; post-war constitution, 116; rise of from late nineteenth century, 156–7; Trump’s attitude towards, 179–80; vocational skills education, 197 gig economy, 62–5 Gladiator (film), 128–9 Glass, Ruth, 46 global economy: centre of gravity shifting eastwards, 21–2, 141; change of guard (January 2017), 19–20, 26–7; emerging middle classes, 21, 31, 39, 159; end of Washington Consensus, 29–30; fast-growing non-Western economies, 20–2; Great Convergence, 12, 13, 24, 25–33; Great Divergence, 13, 22–5; Great Recession, 63–4, 83–4, 192, 193; new protectionism, 19–20, 73, 149; ‘precariat’ (‘left-behinds’), 12, 13, 43–8, 50, 91, 98–9, 110, 111, 131; rapid expansion of China, 20–2, 25–8, 157, 159; spread of market economics, 8, 29; West’s middle-income problem, 13, 31–2, 34–41; see also globalisation, economic; growth, economic globalisation, economic: China as new guardian of, 19–20, 26–7; Bill Clinton on, 26; in decades preceding WW1, 155; Elephant Chart, 31–3; Friedman’s Golden Straitjacket, 74; Jeffrey Garten’s history of, 25; and global trilemma, 72–3; and multinational companies, 26–7; need to abandon deep globalisation, 73–4; next wave of, 32; radical impact of, 12–13; and stateless elites, 51, 71; and Summers’ responsible nationalism, 71–2; and technology, 55–6, 73, 174 Gongos (government-organised non-governmental organisations), 85 Google, 54, 67 Gordon, Robert, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 57–8, 59–61 Graham, Lindsey, 134 Greece: classical, 4, 10, 25, 137–8, 156, 200; overthrow of military junta, 77 Greenspan, Alan, 71 growth, economic: and bad forecasting, 27; as Bell’s ‘secular religion’, 37; and digital economy, 54–5, 59, 60; Elephant Chart, 31–3; emerging economies as engine of, 21, 30, 31, 32; Golden Age for Western middle class, 33–4, 43; Robert Gordon’s thesis, 57–8, 59–61; and levels of trust, 38–9; as liberal democracy’s strongest glue, 13, 37, 103, 201–2; out-dated measurement models, 30–1; technological leap forward (from 1870), 58–9; West’s middle-income problem, 13, 31–2, 34–41 Hamilton, Alexander, 78 Harvard University, 44–5 healthcare and medicine, 35, 36, 42, 58, 59, 60, 62, 102, 103, 198 Hedges, Chris, Empire of Illusion, 125 Hegel, Friedrich, 161–2 Heilbroner, Robert, 10 Hispanics in USA, 94–5 history: 1930s extremism, 116–17; Chinese economy to 1840s, 22–3; Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’, 5, 14, 181; Great Divergence, 13, 22–5; Hobson’s prescience over China, 20–1; and inequality, 41–3; and journalists, 15; Keynes’ view, 153–5; Magna Carta, 9–10; of modern democracy, 112–17; nineteenth-century protectionism, 78; nineteenth-century European diplomacy, 7–8, 155–6, 171–2; non-Western versions of, 11; Obama on, 190; Peace of Westphalia (1648), 171; populist surge in late-nineteenth-century USA, 110–11; post-war golden era, 33–4, 43; post-war US foreign policy, 183–4; technological leap forward (from 1870), 58–9; theories of, 10–11, 14, 190; Thucydides trap, 156–7; utopian faith in technology, 127–8; Western thought on China, 158–9, 161–2; ‘wrong side of history’ language, 187–8, 190, 191–2; Zheng He’s naval fleet, 165–6; see also Cold War; Industrial Revolution Hitler, Adolf, 116, 128, 171 Hobbes, Thomas, 104 Hobsbawm, Eric, 5 Hobson, John, 20, 22–3 Hofer, Norbert, 15–16 homosexuality, 106, 107, 109–10 Hong Kong, 163–4 Hourly Nerd, 63 Hu Jintao, 159 Humphrey, Hubert, 189 Hungary, 12, 82, 138–9, 181 Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations, 181 Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, 128, 129 illiberal democracy concept, 119, 120, 136–7, 138–9, 204 India: caste system, 202; circular view of history, 11; colonial exploitation of, 22, 23, 55–6; democracy in, 201; future importance of, 167, 200–1; and Industrial Revolution, 23–4; internal migration in, 41; as nuclear power, 175; and offshoring, 61–2; pre-Industrial Revolution economy, 22; rapid expansion of, 21, 25, 28, 30, 58, 200, 201–2; Sino-Indian war (1962), 166; as ‘young’ society, 39, 200 Indonesia, 21 Industrial Revolution, 13, 22, 23–4, 46, 53; non-Western influences on, 24–5; and steam power, 24, 55–6 inequality: decline in post-war golden era, 43; and demophobia, 122–3; forces of equalisation, 41–3; global top 1 per cent, 32–3, 50–1; growth of in modern era, 13, 41, 43–51; in India, 202; in liberal cities, 49–51; in nineteenth century, 41; and physical segregation, 46–8; urban–hinterland split, 46–51 infant mortality, 58, 59 inflation, 36 Instagram, 54 intelligence agencies, 133–4 intolerance and incivility, 38 Iran, 175, 193, 194 Iraq War (2003), 8, 81, 85, 156 Isis (Islamic State), 178, 181, 182–3 Islam, 24–5; Trump’s targeting of Muslims, 135, 181–3, 195–6 Israel, 175 Jackson, Andrew, 113–14, 126, 134 Jacobi, Derek, 128–9 Japan, 78, 167, 175 Jefferson, Thomas, 56, 112, 163 Jobs, Steve, 25 Johnson, Boris, 48, 118–19 Jones, Dan, 9 Jospin, Lionel, 90 journalists, 15, 65 judiciary, US, 134–5 Kant, Immanuel, 126 Kaplan, Fred, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, 176–8 Kennedy, John F., 146, 165 Kerry, John, 8 Keynes, John Maynard, 153–5, 156 Khan, A.Q., 175 Khan, Sadiq, 49–50 Kissinger, Henry, 14, 162, 166 knowledge economy, 47, 61 Kreider, Tim, 111 Krugman, Paul, 162 Ku Klux Klan, 98, 111 labour markets: and digital revolution, 52–5, 56, 61–8; and disappearing growth, 37; driving jobs, 56–7, 63, 191; gig economy, 62–5; offshoring, 61–2; pressure to postpone retirement, 64; revolution in nature of work, 60–6, 191–3; security industry, 50; status of technical and service jobs, 197–8; and suburban crisis, 46; wage theft, 192; zero hours contracts, 191 Lanier, Jaron, 66, 67 Larkin, Philip, 188 Le Pen, Marine, 15, 102, 108–10 League of Nations, 155 Lee, Spike, 46 Lee Teng-hui, 158 left-wing politics: and automation, 67; decline in salience of class, 89–92, 107, 108–10; elite’s divorce from working classes, 87–8, 89–95, 99, 109, 110, 119; in France, 105–10; Hillaryland in USA, 87–8; and ‘identity liberalism’, 14, 96–8; McGovern–Fraser Commission (1972), 189; move to personal liberation (1960s), 188–9; populist right steals clothes of, 101–3; Third Way, 89–92; urban liberal elites, 47, 49–51, 71, 87–9, 91–5, 110, 204 Lehman Brothers, 30 Li, Eric, 86, 163–4 liberalism, Western: Chinese hostility to, 84–6, 159–60, 162; crisis as real and structural, 15–16; declining belief in ‘meritocracy’, 44–6; declining hegemony of, 14, 21–2, 26–8, 140–1, 200–1; elites as out of touch, 14, 68–71, 73, 87–8, 91–5, 110, 111, 119, 204; and ‘identity liberalism’, 14, 96–8; linear view of history, 10–11; Magna Carta as founding myth of, 9–10; majority-white backlash concept, 12, 14, 96, 102, 104; psychology of dashed expectations, 34–41; scepticism as basis of, 10; and Trump’s victory, 11–12, 28, 79, 81, 111; ‘wrong side of history’ language, 187–8, 190, 191–2; see also democracy, liberal Lilla, Mark, 96, 98 Lincoln, Abraham, 146 Lindbergh, Charles, 117 literacy, mass, 43, 59 Lloyd George, David, 42 Locke, John, 104 London, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 140 Los Angeles, 50 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 133 Magna Carta, 9–10 Mahbubani, Kishore, 162 Mailer, Norman, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 189 Mair, Peter, 88, 89, 118 Mann, Thomas, 203 Mao Zedong, 163, 165 Marconi, Guglielmo, 128 Marcos, Ferdinand, 136 Marshall, John, 134 Marshall Plan, 29 Marxism, 10, 11, 51, 68, 106, 110, 162 Mattis, Jim, 150–1 May, Theresa, 100, 152, 153 McAfee, Andrew, 60 McCain, John, 134 McMahon, Vince and Linda, 124, 125 McMaster, H.

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education
by Diane Ravitch
Published 2 Mar 2010

Teachers were both the cause of low performance and the cure for low performance. The solution was to get rid of bad teachers and recruit only good ones. Of course, it was difficult to know how to recruit good teachers when the determination of their effectiveness required several years of classroom data. A 2006 paper by Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger, titled “Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job,” took the argument a step further. Like Hanushek and Rivkin, these authors maintained that “paper qualifications,” such as degrees, licenses, and certification, do not predict who will be a good teacher.

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They recommended that school districts pay bonuses to effective teachers who teach in high-poverty schools. And they recommended that the federal government provide grants to states to build data systems to “link student performance with the effectiveness of individual teachers over time.” These recommendations were of more than academic interest, because one of the authors, Robert Gordon of the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based think tank, was subsequently selected by the Obama administration to serve as deputy director for education in the Office of Management and Budget, where he was able to promote his policy ideas. And sure enough, President Obama’s education program included large sums of money for states to build data systems that would link student test scores to individual teachers, as well as funds for merit pay plans that would reward teachers for increasing their students’ test scores.

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Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin, “How to Improve the Supply of High-Quality Teachers,” Brookings Papers on Education Policy, ed. Diane Ravitch (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 14, 16, 19, 21-23. 15 Richard Rothstein, “Comment,” Brookings Papers on Education Policy (2004), 26-27. 16 Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O Staiger, “Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job,” Discussion Paper 2006- 01, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., 5-6. 17 Ibid., 8. 18 Some educators created personality profiles to screen potential teachers, but economists ignored them; www.ed.gov/news/newsletters/innovator/2004/0223.html. 19 Dale Ballou, “Sizing Up Test Scores,” Education Next, Summer 2002, 12-13, 15. 20 Dan Goldhaber and Michael Hansen, Assessing the Potential of Using Value-Added Estimates of Teacher Job Performance for Making Tenure Decisions (Washington, D.C.: CALDER, Urban Institute, 2008), 1, 5-6. 21 Cory Koedel and Julian R.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

But some economists provide an explanation for the current state of the world economy that is explicitly driven from the supply side. Indeed, it is essentially technological. That is to say, they argue that weak growth is at bottom due to the slow rate of technological progress.27 The most famous and the most cogent of these economists is the American scholar Robert Gordon.28 He argues that the recent slowdown in global growth cannot be blamed simply on weakness of aggregate demand or slower growth of the working population. From what we can tell, the underlying growth of productivity appears to have slowed markedly. Gordon says that we should see this in a long historical context.

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Yet the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow famously remarked in 1987: “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” 29 (Mind you, the pickup in US productivity in the late 1990s suggests that the gains from computers were real but, as with many other advances, delayed.) The American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, has put recent technological disappointment more pithily. He has said: “We wanted flying cars. Instead, we got 140 characters.” This contention of Robert Gordon’s that technological progress has largely run its course is sensational. Think of it: the rapid development of the emerging markets slowing inexorably; overall economic progress essentially dribbling away to nothing; living standards barely rising at all; no prospect of the next generation being appreciably better off than the current one; a return to the situation and the outlook (if not the living standards) that pertained before the Industrial Revolution.

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As we saw in the previous chapter, the key characteristics of technological change since the Industrial Revolution have been a relentless increase in productivity that has underpinned a dramatic increase in living standards, and the replacement of many jobs lost because of these technological advances with new jobs created. There are essentially two broad strands to the view that this time it really is different. The first is that developments with regard to robots and AI are really a non-revolution. In essence, this contention amounts to an extension of Robert Gordon’s criticisms of the communications revolution that we encountered in the previous chapter. The critics say that there is a great deal of sound and fury about this subject, but it signifies not very much at all. In essence, they say that this “revolution” is different from everything that has happened since the Industrial Revolution because the engine of economic progress has ground to a halt.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

Even the dismal science of conventional economics, as Michael Hudson shows in a recent trenchant commentary, has failed to recognise the significance of compounding interest on rising indebtedness.1 The result has been to obscure a key part of the explanation for the financial disruptions that shook the world in 2008. So is perpetual compounding growth possible? In recent times there has been a flurry of worry among some economists that faith in the long-held supposition of perpetual growth might be misplaced. Robert Gordon, for example, has suggested in a recent paper that the economic growth experienced over the last 250 years ‘could well be a unique episode in human history rather than a guarantee of endless future advance at the same rate’. His case rests largely on an overview of the path and effects of innovations in the productivity of labour which have underpinned the growth of per capita incomes.

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Even in the case of the long-term financing of infrastructures (such as roads, public works, urbanisation) there was a reasonable presumption that the debt would ultimately be paid off out of the increasing productivity of the social labour engaged in production. It could also be reasonably assumed that all of this would generate increasing per capita incomes. The interstate highway system built in the United States during the three decades after 1960 had a huge impact upon aggregate labour productivity and paid off handsomely. This was, in Robert Gordon’s account, the strongest innovation wave in capital’s history.13 There have always been significant circuits of what can be called ‘fictitious capital’ – investments in mortgages, public debt, urban and national infrastructures and the like. From time to time these flows of fictitious capital got out of hand to form speculative bubbles that ultimately burst to form serious financial and commercial crises.

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I have used some of his materials in what follows. When I raised the question of compound growth in 2011 with two senior economics editors of a major global newspaper, one of them shrugged off the question as trivial if not laughable, while the other said there were still plenty of new technological frontiers to explore so why worry. 2. Robert Gordon, ‘Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds’, Working Paper 18315, Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012. The public reaction to Gordon’s arguments are covered in Thomas Edsall, ‘No More Industrial Revolutions’, New York Times, 15 October 2012.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

As much as anyone, the economist Tyler Cowen rang the alarm when he called the present, particularly in the West, the Great Stagnation. So let's call it the Great Stagnation Debate. Nicholas Negroponte believes we exist amid a ‘Big Idea Famine’. Others see not so much an innovation machine as an ‘Innovation Illusion’. The economist Robert Gordon talks about the ‘fall of growth’, while the physicist Lee Smolin talks about a science no longer capable of revolutionary thought. These and other thinkers point to flat growth rates; incremental and derivative technology; paradigms of knowledge and culture that have been stuck for decades. The common perception of acceleration, they argue, no longer applies to major revolutions.

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Overall, whatever the cause of the growth slowdown, it's noteworthy that technological innovation is not overcoming it. Economic growth and impact at the frontier seems harder to come by today, and this strongly supports the stagnation thesis. During the 2IR, change happened across every dimension of human experience, from housing to communications, transport to healthcare. In contrast, argues economist Robert Gordon, the 3IR concentrated fundamental advances – big ideas – in entertainment, information and communications technologies. Yes, these are significant. But Gordon likes to ask people: if you could have all the innovations from the mid-1990s on, or access to hot and cold running water in your house, which would you choose?

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But it provides stark evidence that a fraught environment now exists for big thinking. And Jones and his colleagues aren't alone among economists. Evidence is mounting from across the field. * Economists are increasingly sceptical about claims that we live in an age of radical innovation. High-profile names like Lawrence Summers, Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen elaborate the idea of ‘secular stagnation’, citing that strange slowing of Western economies despite a surface-level technological abundance. Cowen's ‘Great Stagnation’ is exactly what you'd expect if research productivity were to decline at 5.1 per cent a year.51 Prior to the 1970s, living standards doubled every couple of decades.

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
by Steve Lohr
Published 10 Mar 2015

Huge savings, the authors declare, will result from individualized, predictive servicing of industrial equipment, made possible by sensors and data analysis. The result, they write, will be to move close to the ideal of “zero unplanned downtime.” But data doubters are not persuaded. And the most prominent pessimist is Robert Gordon, a leading economic historian and a professor at Northwestern University, who made his case in a research paper published in August 2012, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds.” In his paper, Gordon asserts that the gains from computing and the Internet have petered out in the past decade.

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“an exciting place for data and analytics right now”: From an e-mail he sent on June 16, 2014. a report coauthored by its chief economist Marco Annunziata and Peter Evans: The report, titled The Industrial Internet@Work, was published on Oct. 28, 2013. https://www.ge.com/sites/default/files/GE_IndustrialInternetatWork_WhitePaper_20131028.pdf. “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?”: Robert Gordon’s critique was a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, published in August 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w18315.pdf. Gordon responded to his detractors: His piece in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Why Innovation Won’t Save Us,” was published in a weekend edition, Dec. 22–23, 2013, p.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

At the 1950–2000 rate of annualized growth, household income doubles in about twenty-five years: A handy rule is that any annual percent divided into 72 produces the length of time required for income to double. So, for example, 2 percent growth, divided into 72, shows that income will double in thirty-six years. Phillip Longman has written: Phillip Longman, “Justice Between Generations,” The Atlantic, June 1985. Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon has won praise from pundits: Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). The Pew Charitable Trusts found in a 2013 study: “Why Do Some Americans Leave the Bottom of the Economic Ladder But Not Others?” (Philadelphia: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2013). Economist Martin Feldstein of Harvard University has argued: Martin Feldstein, “The US Underestimates Growth,” Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2015.

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Phillip Longman has written, “The idea that Americans are bound by destiny to experience ever-greater affluence has been an article of faith since the Second World War.” Western society has entered a phase of preoccupation with discovering previously unknown grievances, one of which is that because of slower growth, the next generation won’t live dramatically better than the present one. Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon has won praise from pundits by producing studies and essays taking the view that the slowdown in growth is not just bad for the national debt but a calamity that ends the American Dream. This aggressive claim can be disputed. The Pew Charitable Trusts found in a 2013 study that, adjusting for age and smaller families, 84 percent of Americans earn more than their parents did.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

What might shock civiHans, though, is that the labor input must also be adjusted for quality, so that the contributions of the experienced engineer and the green janitor can be expressed in the same metric. To the more softhearted among us, that seems a bit callous—and it even gets ugly. For example, Robert Gordon (2000) attributes the slowdown in productivity growth in the 1970s to deterioration in average workforce quality, specifically, the "shift toward less experienced teenagers and the rapid inflow of females into the labor force." Yes, teens are inexperienced and even moody, but why should the flow of women into paid work be so corrupting?

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With so much of real growth 62 After the New Economy now concentrated in computers and other high-tech areas—dependent on the quirks of price indexes and quaHty adjustments—reported growth may have less relevance to the average person in the street than ever. One in five children in poverty, 41 miUion people without health insurance—but processor speed is doubHng every year and a halfl Cordon's critique Prestige economics' most prominent critic of these productivity revo arguments is Robert Gordon of Northwestern. Initially, he argued that after correcting for the unsustainably strong economy of the late 1990s, the acceleration in productivity was almost entirely concentrated in computers and other high-tech. Normal benchmark revisions of the GDP data forced him to retreat from the claim a bit.

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time
by Clark Blaise
Published 27 Oct 2000

He obviously knew how to compute the time, although his method was, as might be expected, a curious mixture of the natural and rational. He was computing the nautical day, “natural” time at sea, yet not making the “rational” leap into mean (averaged) time. Standardization simply had not yet become an urgent matter, except with regard to the floating lunch hour. When he landed in Glasgow, he ran into a bootblack, “wee Robert Gordon,” whose pert, aggressive ways sold him on a shine. He also hired the boy to take him on a walking tour of Glasgow. I invited the little boot-black to breakfast with me which he gladly accepted. He sat opposite me and we had a long chat. He supports a widowed mother and earns from 8/- to 12/- per week.

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Robert then took me from Jamaica Street where we breakfasted along Buchanan and Argyle Streets to see the shops and I left him at the Exchange to pursue his vocation. I found Robert an intelligent boy and one who is bound to succeed in life. No, there followed no promise of sponsorship to Canada, a job, or a college scholarship for wee Robert Gordon. There is simple (“manly,” as Thoreau might have put it) recognition of a lad, much like himself, whose pride and genius for hard work, for responsibility, for individualism, recommended him to the future, another spiritual son of the patron saint of all self-made entrepreneurs, all young men of pluck, industry, native intelligence, and cultivated good luck, Benjamin Franklin.

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What to Do About It, and Why It Matters More Than You Think
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 6 Mar 2012

As a result, the idea of the wealthy landowner has become relevant again in the United States. Indeed, relevant in a way that (in some respects) it’s only rarely been in our history. Return again to the idea that $250,000 doesn’t buy you as much in Manhattan as it does in Fargo. Northwestern University professor Robert Gordon cited much data along these lines in a paper asking “Has the Rise in American Inequality Been Exaggerated?” and answering, as you can imagine from the title, that it has been. Many observers have noted that the so-called college wage premium—the gap between what college graduates and those without college degrees earn—has increased over the past thirty or forty years.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession exposed almost a decade’s worth of Western growth as an illusion, a diverse cast of economists and political scientists and other figures on both the left and the right have begun to talk about stagnation and repetition and complacency and sclerosis as defining features of this Western age: Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, Thomas Piketty and Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber and Peter Thiel, and many others. This book is, in part, an attempt to synthesize their various perspectives into a compelling account of our situation. But it also weaves the social sciences together with observations on our intellectual climate, our popular culture, our religious moment, our technological pastimes, in the hopes of painting a fuller portrait of our decadence than you can get just looking at political science papers on institutional decay or an economic analysis of the declining rate of growth.

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For the pessimists, the unusual features of the post-2007 landscape—the persistently low interest rates, the low rate of inflation, the disappointing rate of growth, the great fortunes parked in rent-seeking rather than risk-taking—are actually inevitabilities in a developed world where there just aren’t enough impressive enterprises to invest in; a developed world that inflates bubbles and then pops them (or invests in Theranos and then repents) because that’s all there is for capital to do; a developed world slowly growing accustomed to unexpected limits on its future possibilities. The most convincing theorists of limits include Cowen, in his 2011 book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, and his fellow economist Robert Gordon, in his magisterial 2016 work, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Both authors would agree with portions of the arguments I’ve just sketched about neoliberalism pushed too far or misapplied, and an economy stalled by inequality or captured by a self-dealing upper class.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

As machinery got more sophisticated, power got cheaper, and science was increasingly applied to industrial matters, a whole new group of industries sprung up. This created masses of new jobs for workers making things that had never existed—except in the science fiction novels of Jules Verne. Robert Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, argues that the Second Industrial Revolution—what he calls the “special century” (1870–1970)—dropped a cluster bomb of innovations on the advanced economies. The economic “bomblets” exploded over a wide area, with each explosion producing a chain reaction of innovation, rising productivity, and income growth.7 This was an example of the happy helix of innovation and industrialization creating masses of new jobs in brand new sectors.

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The opposite is true as well. The whole adjustment process was made more difficult by the fact that economic growth slipped into low gear. The economics profession still does not have a full explanation for this, but one notion that fits tightly into the Serivces Transformation is the story told by Robert Gordon, whose ideas we encountered in Chapter 2. He argues that growth and innovation didn’t slow down from the 1970s but rather that they returned to historical norms. The cluster of new inventions that arose from about 1870 accelerated innovation and thus incomes, but not forever. The collection of new inventions—everything from electric motors to plastics—proved to be a rich pallet with which clever inventors “painted” new products and new ways of making old products.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

It is possible, as Bhavish Aggarwal, the youthful co-founder and CEO of Ola suggested to me in 2015, that of the hundreds of millions of the newly minted Indian middle class who attain an income level that allows them to consider buying a car over the coming decade, many will “leapfrog” the inefficient ownership phase entirely, instead entering the automobile usage market directly as on-demand consumers. In a series of recent talks, the economist Robert Gordon from Northwestern University has lamented the slowdown in US productivity growth and, in particular, the absence of clear evidence that the digital revolution of the last two decades has had a significant impact on the growth rates of total factor productivity. A now-famous slide from one of his recent articles is replicated in figure 5.2.21 Figure 5.2 Growth rate of total factor productivity for each ten-year period (i.e., for the decades ending 1900 to 2010).

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One might instead consider using the term “efficiency” of capital or “productivity” of capital. However, these words have specific (and somewhat distinct) meanings in economics that don’t fully capture what I’m trying to communicate. 20. Clay Shirky, from a talk at the Collaborative-Peer-Sharing Economy Summit, New York University, May 30, 2014. 21. Robert Gordon, “US Economic Growth Is Over: The Short Run Meets the Long Run,” in Think Tank 20: Growth, Convergence and Income Distribution: The Road from the Brisbane G-2- Summit (Washington DC: Brookings Institute, 2015), 188. http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Interactives/2014/thinktank20/chapters/tt20-united-states-economic-growth-gordon.pdf?

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

In his 2011 bestseller The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen suggested that developed countries might have exhausted easy sources of good investments, such as settling new land or getting children to spend more years in education. Most memorably, he argued that technological progress might have slowed down, or, more specifically, that the economic benefit of new discoveries was less than had been the case in the past. The economist and economic historian Robert Gordon developed this theme in his influential 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, in which he argued that the inventions over the twentieth century, such as electricity, indoor plumbing, and the like, were part of “one big wave of innovation” that will not be repeated. This explanation for secular stagnation has proved controversial, not least because it turns out to be very difficult to measure whether technological progress has slowed down.

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Paying for citizens to go to school for longer was, for much of twentieth century, an important way that governments increased productivity; the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz documented the vital role of education in the economic growth of the United States, pointing out, for example, that while 62 percent of the 1930 US birth cohort graduated from high school, 85 percent of the 1975 cohort did (Goldin and Katz 2008). Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have argued that there are diminishing returns here—children and young people can only spend so long in school or college—and that this will prove to be a major brake on US economic growth in the future (Gordon 2016; Cowen 2011). Working out how to defy these diminishing returns has proved challenging.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

World Economic Outlook 2015: Uneven Growth: Short- and Long-Term Factors (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2015), pp. 69–71, pdf available at imf.org. 133.We do not pretend to adjudicate between the competing explanations here, but merely point to the growing consensus about a new era of lower growth: Andrew Kliman, ‘What Lies Ahead: Accelerating Growth or Secular Stagnation?’ E-International Relations, 24 January 2014, at e-ir.info; Robert Gordon, Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 2012, at nber.org; Lawrence Summers, ‘US Economic Prospects: Secular Stagnation, Hysteresis, and the Zero Lower Bound’, Business Economics 49: 2 (2014); Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); Coen Teulings and Richard Baldwin, eds, Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes and Cures (London: CEPR, 2014). 134.Cowen, Great Stagnation, pp. 47–8. 135.Thor Berger and Carl Benedikt Frey, Industrial Renewal in the 21st Century: Evidence from US Cities?

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The ILO also argues that today’s sluggish global job growth is related largely to sluggish economic growth, but they also note that productivity growth has recovered quicker than employment growth. ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), pp. 19, 23. 40.Bank of International Settlements, Annual Report, 2013/2014 (Basel: Bank for International Settlements, 2014), at bis.org, pp. 58–60; Robert Gordon, ‘US Productivity Growth: The Slowdown Has Returned After a Temporary Revival’, International Productivity Monitor 25 (2013); David Autor, ‘Roundtable: The Future of Jobs’, presented at the The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine, Hamilton Project, Washington, DC, 19 February 2015, at hamiltonproject.org. 41.Susantu Basu and John Fernald, Information and Communications Technology as a General-Purpose Technology: Evidence from U.S.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

But these were merely examples of the delayed arrival of the whirlwind that had upended rich countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After so long a period of modest economic evolution, many of us have forgotten that economic advance ever occurs at any other speed. Some techno-pessimists, such as Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, argue that the slowdown is irreversible. Technological progress, he argues, gathered momentum over a long period of time thanks to a series of fundamental intellectual insights. The development of a deep understanding of what electricity is and how it might be used is not something that can easily – or perhaps ever – be duplicated.

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In 1987 the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow mused, in a piece pooh-poohing the prospect of a looming technological transformation, that the evidence for the revolutionary power of computers simply wasn’t there. ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics’, he reckoned, and he had a point.9 Productivity perked up in the 1990s but wheezed out again in the 2000s. And that, some seemed to conclude, was all there was. In the 2000s Robert Gordon began posing a thought experiment to his audiences: would they, he wondered, prefer a world with all the available technology up to 2000, or one with all available technology up to the present day except for indoor plumbing? His little test effectively made the point that what occurred in the second industrial revolution was powerfully transformative, in a way the advances of the internet age simply weren’t.

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It)
by Michael R. Strain
Published 25 Feb 2020

Men saw their college-degree attainment increase from 21 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2018.25 In 1983, the median net worth for a family was approximately $52,000 (inflation-adjusted to 2016 dollars).26 By 2016, median net worth had grown to $97,300.27 I don’t want to take up too much space demonstrating the obvious in this short book, but here are some additional datums taken from two recent books, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by the economist Robert Gordon, and Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker.: Improvements in heart attack survival rates from 1984 to 1998 yielded a one-year increase in life expectancy worth $70,000 for a $10,000 cost of improved medical technology.28 According to Gordon, the mortality rate from cardiovascular/renal disease has fallen from 500 people per 100,000 in 1970 to under 300 per 100,000 in 2007.29 And by 2017, cardiovascular deaths had fallen to 165 per 100,000.30 The development of antiretroviral therapy has improved quality of life for 1.2 million Americans with HIV and allowed them to have an “almost normal lifespan without experiencing serious illnesses related to their HIV infection.”31 Nearly 90 percent of households had computers, and nearly 80 percent had internet access by 2013.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
by James Livingston
Published 15 Feb 2016

Soon even higher education, the last redoubt of debtors’ prison, will be free, not because the politicians will restore Pell Grants and fund state universities, but because MOOCs and YouTube will give everyone online access to the most influential academics on the planet—from Michael Sandel and Martha Nussbaum to David Harvey. Rifkin and I agree that as the market registers fewer transactions—as we produce and distribute more goods without the mediation of money—our assessments of future economic growth, GDP and so forth, must begin to look bleak. Leading economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have, accordingly, predicted the decline of innovation and the end of growth. After all, the Commerce Department can’t measure what’s off the books. But that’s the thing about this new stage of economic development—it can’t be measured by the old quantitative criteria, even though we’re unquestionably producing more of what we need and want.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

By all measures, effort (the amount of resources devoted to innovation) and outputs (productivity growth relative to other high-wage economies) of U.S. investment to produce innovation appear to be both substantially higher and more successful. There are also reasons to believe productivity growth is higher than it appears to be. The Boskin Commission and decades of follow-up work by Northwestern University’s Robert Gordon, for example, also find understatement of productivity growth. This understatement largely stems from the U.S. Consumer Price Index’s failure to fully account for the value of replacing old goods with more valuable innovations—for example, by replacing landline-based telephones with smartphones.

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John Cochrane, “Toward a Run-Free Financial System,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2014, https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.co chrane/research/papers/run_free.pdf. Edward Lazear, “How Not to Prevent the Next Financial Meltdown,” Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-not-to-pre vent-the-next-financial-meltdown-1443827426. 30. Conard, Unintended Consequences. 31. Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011). 32. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920). 33.

Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek
Published 22 Dec 2016

The End of the Postwar Exception It is increasingly obvious to many that we live in a time still coming to terms with the breakdown of the postwar settlement. Thomas Piketty argues that the reduction in inequality after the Second World War was an exception to the general rule of capitalism; Robert Gordon sees high productivity growth in the middle of the twentieth century as an exception to the historical norm; and numerous thinkers on the left have long argued that the postwar period was an unsustainably good period for capitalism.4 That exceptional moment – broadly defined at the international level by embedded liberalism, at the national level by social democratic consensus, and at the economic level by Fordism – has been falling apart since the 1970s.

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable
by James Owen Weatherall
Published 2 Jan 2013

This is where the Boskin Commission came in. It was a masterful sleight of hand. Working backward from the figure of $1 trillion, which Moynihan believed would be necessary to keep Social Security solvent, he and Packwood determined that inflation would need to be reduced by 1.1%. According to notes written by Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University and one of the five members of the commission, Dale Jorgenson — the Harvard economist who had thrown Malaney out of his office — reported to the commission early on that they were aiming for $1 trillion in Social Security savings over ten years, and that this meant they needed to come up with the requisite reduction in inflation.

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.”: For a history of the politics surrounding Social Security, see Beland (2005), Altman (2005), or Baker and Weisbrot (1999). “. . . until Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Bob Packwood . . . shared a moment of inspiration . . .”: See Sheehan (2010), Moynihan (1996), and Katzmann (2008) for various perspectives on the origins of the Boskin Commission. “According to notes written by Robert Gordon . . .”: The notes I am alluding to are Gordon (2002). Gordon also tells the story of the Boskin Commission and its critics in Gordon (2006), though this narrative version does not include Moynihan’s role. “The Boskin Commission’s findings were criticized from all corners”: See especially Sheehan (2010), as well as Triplett (2006) and Bosworth (1997).

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets
by Thomas Philippon
Published 29 Oct 2019

FISHER, PROFESSOR OF PATHOLOGY, ADDRESSING A SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN 1978 If economists are to be of any use to society—a big “if,” some critics might add—then at the very least they should be able to challenge common wisdom, to take a contrarian perspective, and to avoid repeating what everyone else is saying. This is what I find so remarkably refreshing in Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Contrary to the techno-optimists arguing that innovation has never been faster, Bob argues that our current wave of innovation is not nearly as transformative as previous waves have been. Bob may or may not be right, but he is willing to think coherently about a topic and base his conclusions on data and logic instead of anecdotes and preconceived ideas.

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Economic theory shows that this kind of technological progress is the only sustainable source of growth in the long run. The slowdown in TFP growth started in 2000 and is now widespread among rich countries. The Great Recession of 2008–2009 has probably reinforced this negative trend, but it has not created it (Cette, Fernald, and Mojon, 2016). Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, argues that the remarkable growth in productivity from 1870 to 1970 is unlikely to repeat itself. The benefits of the Second Industrial Revolution, associated with electricity and the internal combustion engine, were deep and wide. In his view, computers and communication technologies are simply less important.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

Unless we pack up our creative instincts and put away our impulse to innovate, unless we shout “job done” and wash our hands of AI as a field, the machines we build in the future will be far more capable than they are today. I hope that even the most conservative economists who think about the future would not disagree that this is our direction of travel: machines gradually encroaching on more and more tasks, relentlessly becoming more capable with the passing of time. Take the economic historian, Robert Gordon, famed for his technological skepticism. In the last few years, there has been much heated discussion about his major work, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, in which he argues that our best technological times are behind us. (Or, as the economist Paul Krugman put it, “the future isn’t what it used to be.”)75 Gordon believes that the low-hanging fruits on the tree of economic growth have already been picked.

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Similar searches are done in “On Earnings Calls, Big Data Is Out. Execs Have AI on the Brain,” CB Insights, 30 November 2017; Bass, “Non-tech Businesses.” 75.  Paul Krugman, “Paul Krugman Reviews ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ by Robert J. Gordon,” New York Times, 25 January 2016. 76.  Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017). 77.  In eighty-seven years’ time because 100 × 1.00887 = 200.01, to two decimal places. If the United States were to return to the 2.41 percent growth rate, the same doubling of wealth would take just twenty-nine years: 100 × 1.024129 = 199.50.

EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts
by Ashoka Mody
Published 7 May 2018

In contrast, European productivity was growing slowly, well below the pace in the United States.21 This US-​Europe productivity growth difference reflected the fact that although both had been in the economic doldrums for much of the 1970s and 1980s, the American economy had reinvented itself and the European economy had not. The new “American dominance,” Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon wrote, arose in large part from “the fruitful collaboration of government research funding, world-​leading private universities, innovative private firms, and a dynamic capital market.”22 Europe had nothing comparable to offer. The new European Central Bank, in its inaugural Monthly Bulletin in January 1999, highlighted serious impediments to growth in the eurozone and began what would be a ritualistic call on national governments to schröder asserts the german national interest 127 undertake “necessary structural reforms to increase the flexibility and efficiency of markets.”23 In March 1999, the IMF completed the first of its planned twice-a-year assessments of the eurozone economy.

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(Return on equity, percent) Source: Bankscope. 168   e u r o t r a g e d y briefly, in 2006 and 2007, when the leverage ratio of eurozone banks reached dangerous heights, did investors in eurozone banks earn high equity returns. With Productivity Growth Stalled, Impatient Banks Take New Risks The problem was that while the euro gave new impetus to the eurozone’s banks, it did little to boost productivity growth, which remained weak. As Northwestern University’s Robert Gordon noted, Europe was “left at the station when America’s productivity locomotive departed.”54 Between 1995 and the early 2000s, US companies employed more workers and used technical advances to make them more productive.55 But European businesses missed that window.56 Even German and French productivity had failed to keep pace with US progress; Italy and Spain performed even worse (figure 4.6).

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Breakthroughs in biotechnology and information-​communications technologies and in the production and delivery of renewable energy could revolutionize economic and social structures worldwide. Such breakthroughs could sweep away the eurozone’s—​indeed, the world’s—​economic and financial stresses, until, that is, human beings mess things up again. But the promised tantalizing breakthroughs have not yet come. Robert Gordon, economics professor at Northwestern University, has long been pessimistic that such breakthroughs will come anytime soon. In an exhaustive study, he has argued that modern technologies, despite their continual promise, will not match the technological advances achieved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 Those earlier transformative advances included the development and spread of electricity, telephony and other 442   e u r o t r a g e d y communications technologies, the internal combustion engine, running water and sanitation, and chemicals, plastics, antibiotics, and other modern medicines.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel
by David Metz
Published 21 Jan 2014

I have proposed that it is this high level of access, choice and opportunities that accounts for the cessation of growth of personal daily travel that is observed in developed countries. A complementary influence is the difficulty of devising technologies that would allow us to travel even faster at acceptable cost, safety and environmental impact. We seem to have reached the end of an era of technological advance. This is not unique to transport. Robert Gordon, a US economist, argues that there have been three industrial revolutions: the first created steam engines, cotton spinning and the railways; the second, electricity, the internal combustion engine and modern water supply. Both these required about one hundred years to percolate through the economy.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

That’s a pace lower than at any time since the 1970s and half what was seen during the postwar boom years. This leads some to argue that the anecdotal accounts of great breakthroughs in robotics and computation are misleading, because they aren’t actually being translated into economic results. The economists Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon are most closely associated with this view.15 Doug Henwood, of the Left Business Observer, makes a similar case from the Left.16 For more conservative economists like Cowen and Gordon, the problem is largely technical. The new technologies aren’t really all that great, at least from an economic perspective, compared to breakthroughs like electricity or the internal combustion engine.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

Summers does not argue that secular stagnation in the advanced economies is inevitable but that it could become the reality if policy makers do not take steps to heighten demand such as increasing public investment in infrastructure and changing regulations to spur private investment in alternative energy sources.2 Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon sees other forces working to slow long-term growth in the United States. One is simple demographics: the baby boomers are retiring, so the labor force is growing more slowly than the number of retirees, a dynamic that is not going to change anytime soon. He also points to the plateauing of mass education (and therefore less growth in skills), rising inequality, and soaring public debt as forces slowing growth.

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-Thai Relations After September 11, 2001,” to the Asia Foundation in Bangkok on March 13, 2002, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/kelly_002.asp. 2. For a series of articles in which Summers lays out his views on secular stagnation, see his webpage: http://larrysummers.com/secular-stagnation. 3. See also Robert Gordon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds,” working paper 18315, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, August 2012, www.nber.org/papers/w18315.pdf. 4. Press Information Bureau, Government of India, Prime Minister’s Office, “Sixth BRICS Summit—Fortaleza Declaration,” July 16, 2014, paragraphs 5 and 18, http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

At its core, the American energy revolution is a technology revolution. The Technology Edge Today, an interesting debate is under way over whether the digital technology revolution is really a big deal in terms of improving U.S. productivity. Leading skeptics about America’s productivity boom, such as Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, say the computer and the Internet, even when rendered mobile in handheld devices, do less to raise productivity than inventions from previous technology revolutions—particularly the emergence in the late nineteenth century of electricity, the combustion engine, and indoor plumbing. The technology bulls say we haven’t seen anything yet.

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The stagnation of middle-class wages in the United States is in part a function of the fact that U.S. companies (and unions too) have been faster than their rivals to accept the need to reduce wages, or to institute two-tier pay scales that start new workers at lower wages. The resulting increase in productivity is driving up the profitably of large companies and the wealth of the richest Americans. Robert Gordon figures that between 1993 and 2008, real incomes in the United States rose by an annual average of 1.3 percent, but more than half of those gains went to the richest 1 percent of households. It’s tough to make an economy more competitive and more fair at the same time. Judged by my rules on how to read the billionaire lists, however, the United States does not rank too badly in terms of the economic impact of inequality.

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms
by Russell Napier
Published 18 Jan 2016

One can refer to monetary and price adjustments in the period with a high degree of certainty, but the alteration in the size of the economy is subject to greater uncertainty. The first published gross domestic product (GDP) statistics prepared by the US Department of Commerce relate to 1929. Prior to 1929, there are only estimates by economic historians of the growth in the US economy. FIGURE 7. ANNUAL PERCENTAGE CHANGE IN GDP Source: Nathan Balke and Robert Gordon, The Estimation of Pre-war GNP: Methodology and New Evidence. NBER Working Papers 2674 While real economic growth had been strong from the end of 1914 to the end of 1919, much of that growth is accounted for by the boom year of 1916, when the war in Europe was demanding greater resources and neutral US helped provide them.

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This bibliography, by no means exhaustive, covers material directly related to that search. Publisher, edition and date of publication relate to the particular copy I had to hand, and web addresses refer to the home pages from where to find relevant data. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows (Bobbs-Merrill, 1962) Nathan Balke and Robert Gordon, The Estimation of Pre-war GNP: Methodology and New Evidence (NBER Working Papers 2674) Paul F. Boller, Jr., Presidential Campaigns (Oxford University Press, 1984) Linda Holman Bentley and Jennifer J. Kiesl, Investment Statistics Locator (Oryx Press, 1995) Peter L. Bernstein, Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street (The Free Press, 1992) Warren Buffett, How Inflation Swindles the Equity Investor (Fortune, May 1977) Harold Borger, Outlay and Income in the United States 1921-1938 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1942) John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, 1969) John Brooks, The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street’s Bullish 60s (John Wiley & Sons, 1999) Hugh Bullock, The Story of Investment Companies (Columbia University Press, 1959) H.

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century
by Mark Leonard
Published 4 Sep 2000

And a Europe with fifty members will be an even more serious economic player than the Euro-25.27 The Stockholm Consensus vs. the American Business Model But the success of an economic model goes beyond the size of GDP: it depends on its ability to attract others and through that to set the rules for the global economy. The real costs of the American economic model are becoming ever clearer. Professor Robert Gordon of North-western University shows that the size of the American GDP hides the fact that much of it is going into unproductive things: Cars rather than public transport: for example, Americans must buy cars because public transport is so lousy. The value of the cars is calculated in American GDP, but European public-transport systems are counted not at their value to passengers but as a cost to government.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2010

One of the most interesting debates in economics is whether or not the American economy has undergone a sharp increase in the rate of productivity growth. Some economists, including Alan Greenspan during his tenure as Fed chairman, have argued that investments in information technology have led to permanently higher rates of productivity growth. Others, such as Robert Gordon at Northwestern University, believe that productivity growth has not changed significantly when one interprets the data properly. The answer to that debate matters enormously. From 1947 to 1975, productivity grew at an annual rate of 2.7 percent a year. From 1975 until the mid-1990s, for reasons that are still not fully understood, productivity growth slowed to 1.4 percent a year.

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Jason Hill, Erik Nelson, David Tilman, Stephen Polasky, and Douglas Tiffany, “Environmental, Economic, and Energetic Costs and Benefits of Biodiesel and Ethanol Biofuels,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 103, no. 30 (July 25, 2006). 3. Nicholas Kristof, “Ethanol, for All Its Critics, Fuels Farmer Support and Iowa’s Role in Presidential Races,” New York Times, January 21, 2000. 4. Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger, “Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job,” The Hamilton Project Policy Brief No. 2006–01, April 2006. 5. Roger Ferguson, Jr., “Economic Policy for Our Era: The Ohio Experience,” Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, May 15, 2000. 6.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

By about mid-century, practical interchangeability became a fact for virtually all military muskets produced by the armories and private contractors. But legend to the contrary, machines by themselves were still far from being able to consistently achieve such tolerances. A series of microscopic analyses by Robert Gordon showed that precision fitting of firing action components required improvements in hand-finishing at least as great as those in machining. And until very recent times, it was rarely cost effective to attempt to replace all hand-finishing with machinery. The achievement of armory practice and high-precision interchangeability, therefore, was the creation of an integrated process of specification, measurement, work flow, and the highest-quality standards in both machining and hand work.87 The value of mass production processes was proven in the crucible of the Civil War.

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The trip-hammer had been around a long time, so Waters appears to have patented the application to barrel welding, rather than the tool. am The frame arrangement described here was used for gun stocks. The original patent application shows a shoe last, a more compact shape, and is arranged differently. The application identified a variety of possible arrangements for different product types. an As Robert Gordon has pointed out, interpreting such results is uncertain without knowing all the context of the tests, the target audiences, and hidden agendas. Note the wide variance between this report and the one at West Point. ao Hall hypothesized a man cutting a plate exactly square. Normally he would “Square the 2d side by the 1st, and the 3d. by the 2d., and the 4th by the 3rd., but on comparing the 4th side with the 1st, it would still be found that they are not square; the cause is that in squaring each side by the preceding side, there is a slight but imperceptible variation and the comparison of the 4th with the 1st gives the sum of the variations of each side from a true square.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

From this and similar historical examples, it has long been argued that a temporary decline in what William Morris called “worthy work” is to be expected, collateral damage in a process by which over the long term technology creates more and better jobs. Yet while innovations of the industrial age often resulted in significant job creation, it’s far from certain the same can be said of the digital age. Indeed, some experts argue that automation and digitalization are more likely to be linked to a general decline in job creation. Economist Robert Gordon, for one, points out that as electronic data becomes cost-free, its marginal benefit in terms of labor creation approaches zero. Facebook and other information providers rely on customers to create content—all those messages, photos, videos, comments, likes, and pokes generate plenty of revenue for Facebook and its investors without necessarily creating many jobs.

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linked to a general decline in job creation In a 2014 poll of leading academic economists conducted by the Chicago Initiative on Global Markets on the impact of technology on employment and earnings, 43 percent agreed that “information technology and automation are a central reason why median wages have been stagnant in the US over the past decade, despite rising productivity,” while only 28 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. “Robots,” IGM Forum, February 25, 2014, http://www.igmchicago.org/​surveys/​robots. its marginal benefit in terms of labor creation approaches zero Robert Gordon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds” (NBER Working Paper No. 18315, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, August 2012), http://www.nber.org/​papers/​w18315. “beating out less-educated workers for barista and clerical jobs” Paul Beaudry, David Green, and Benjamin Sand, “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks” (NBER Working Paper No. 18901, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, March 2013), http://dx.doi.org/​doi:10.3386/​w18901.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

See Niek Koning, The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism: Agrarian Politics in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA, 1846–1919, Routledge, 2002. 42 See UN Food and Agriculture Organization, State of Food and Agriculture 2000; and Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis, Monthly Review, 2006, pp. 375–440. 43 Statistics drawn from Groningen Growth and Development Centre, 10-Sector Database, updated January 2015; global agricultural employment share for the 1980s from David Grigg, “Agriculture in the World Economy: an Historical Geography of Decline,” Geography, vol. 77, no. 3, 1992, p. 221 and for 2018 from ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook – Trends 2019, 2019, p. 14. 44 See Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Basic Books, 2015, pp. 181–91; Stern, Raising the Floor, pp. 69–70. See also Conor Dougherty, “Self-Driving Trucks May Be Closer Than They Appear,” New York Times, November 13, 2017. Robert Gordon, ever the skeptic, doubts the hype. See Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth, p. 599ff. 45 Although it employs fewer workers worldwide, the mining industry may be the first to widely deploy automated production. For Rio Tinto’s plans in Western Australia, see William Wilkes, “How the World’s Biggest Companies are Fine-Tuning the Robot Revolution,” Dow Jones Institutional News, May 14, 2018. 46 See Ellen Israel Rosen, Making Sweatshops: The Globalization of the US Apparel Industry, University of California Press, 2002; and Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labour, New Press, 1999. 47 Phil Neel, “Swoosh,” Ultra, November 8, 2015, available at ultracom.org; Anna Nicolaou and Kiran Stacey, “Stitched up by Robots,” Financial Times, July 19, 2017; Jennifer Bissell-Linsk, “Robotics in the Running,” Financial Times, October 23, 2017; Jon Emont, “The Robots Are Coming for Garment Workers.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

It was partly due to policies such as these that, between 1929 and 1945, lower incomes would grow faster than higher and, for the next twenty-five years, wages grew at about the same rate for everyone, rich or poor. This Great Compression led to ‘a golden age for millions of high school graduates’, writes the economist Professor Robert Gordon, ‘who without a college education could work steadily at a unionized job and make a high enough income to afford a suburban house with a backyard, one or two cars and a life style of which median-income earners in most other countries could only dream.’ Encouraging this new collective spirit was the rise of industrial automation.

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Gordon (Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 606. between 1929 and 1945, lower incomes would grow faster: The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Robert J. Gordon (Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 613. ‘a golden age for millions of high school graduates’, writes the economist Professor Robert Gordon, ‘who without a college education . . .’: The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Robert J. Gordon (Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 609. It was around this time, as Susan Cain has famously documented, that the provost of Harvard University: Quiet, Susan Cain (Penguin, 2013), p. 127.

Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies
by Judith Stein
Published 30 Apr 2010

Most others—steel, auto, computers, food processing—functioned without government direction or mandate. Because Keynesians lacked answers to the ailing food, oil, and manufacturing sectors, the planners earned a hearing. In his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1976, Robert Gordon, one of Keynes’s high priests, acknowledged that “we economists pay too little attention to the changing institutional environment that conditions economic behavior…. We shy away from the big questions about how and why the institutional structure is changing—and where it is taking us.”80The Humphrey-Javits bill proposed to examine environments and create an Office of National Economic Planning to oversee the traditionally regulated and the unregulated parts of the economy—both infrastructure and production.

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This pattern continued up to the present, except for the years from 1995–2000, when the lowest fifth outpaced the top fifth. Still, even in the second half of the Clinton presidency, the top 5 percent did better than everyone else. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Sylvia Allegretto, The State of Working America, 2006–2007 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 58; Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon, “Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?” paper presented at the Eighty-First Meeting of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Washington D.C., Sept. 8–9, 2005, 72. 14. Economist (Oct. 4–11, 2008), 11. 15. Robert W. Stevenson, “Capitalism After the Fall,” Week in Review, New York Times, Apr. 19, 2009.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

If you become seriously ill, then the amount spent on you will far exceed $1,400 a year, and if you don’t, you are very lucky. A lot can and must change with slowdown. THE TECHNOLOGICAL MIRAGE We now lament that the technological innovations that will make the greatest changes to our lives have already been made. As Robert Gordon made clear in 2012: “The frontier established by the US for output per capita, and the UK before it, gradually began to grow more rapidly after 1750, reached its fastest growth rate in the middle of the 20th century, and has slowed down since. It is in the process of slowing down further.”13 He did not notice or mention it, but innovation is also not speeding up elsewhere.

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Engels, preface to the third German edition of Das Kapital (1867), p. 17 of the most popular public domain edition: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf. 12. Isabel Sawhill and Christopher Pulliam, Six Facts about Wealth in the United States, Middle Class Memo Series, Brooking Institute, 25 June 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/06/25/six-facts-about-wealth-in-the-united-states/. 13. Robert Gordon, “Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds,” Centre for Economic Research Policy Insight, no. 6 (September 2012), https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/policy_insights/PolicyInsight63.pdf. 14. Danny Dorling, Do We Need Economic Inequality? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 130 (figure 8.1), http://www.dannydorling.org/books/economicinequality/figures-and-tables/figure-8-1.html. 15.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy Siegel
Published 7 Jan 2014

But productivity growth in the developed countries must rely on innovation and invention since these economies are already operating at the frontier of technological know-how. Historically, productivity in the developed world has increased at a remarkably steady 2 to 2½ percent per year, which means that every 35 years the standard of living doubles.11 But some economists, such a Professor Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, believe that productivity growth is due to fall dramatically in the United States.12 He cites the aging of the population, growing income inequality, and faltering educational achievement, among others factors, as the reasons for the decline. Except for the top 1 percent of the income distribution, Gordon predicts the vast majority of the U.S. population will experience growth of only 0.5 percent per year, less than one-quarter the long-term average.

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In the United States, productivity is defined as output per hour worked, although in Europe it is often defined as output per worker. 11. Productivity growth was slightly higher immediately following World War II, but since 1960, productivity growth in the United States has shown no significant downward trend. 12. Robert Gordon, “Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts Six Headwinds,” NBER #18315, August 2012. For a rejoinder, see the response by John Cochrane of the University of Chicago in his blog at http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/08/gordon-on-growth.html. 13. Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, New York: Dutton Adult, 2011. 14.

Money Free and Unfree
by George A. Selgin
Published 14 Jun 2017

“Romer” series, 1869–1929: real GNP from Christina Romer (1989: Table 2). “Standard” and “Romer” series, 1929–2009: spliced to real GNP (Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Department of Commerce, retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://fred.stlouisfed.org). “Balke-Gordon” series, 1869–1983: real GNP from Nathan Balke and Robert Gordon (1986: App. B, Table 1); 1984–2009: spliced to Bureau of Economic Analysis real GNP. SOURCE: All data are from Carter et al. (2006). According to Romer’s own pre-1929 GNP series, which relies on statistical estimates of the relationship between total and commodity output movements (instead of Kuznets’ naïve one-to-one assumption), the cyclical volatility of output prior to the Fed’s establishment was actually lower than it has been throughout the full (1915–2009) Fed era (Table 8.2, row 2, and Figure 8.5, second panel).

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Axel Leijonhufvud (1981) and Steven Horwitz (2003) discuss costs of inflation, including those of “coping” with high inflation environments and those connected to inflation’s tendency to distort relative prices, that elude measurement and are for that reason overlooked by both Feldstein and Lucas. 6. These findings are based on Nathan Balke and Robert Gordon’s (1986) quarterly GNP deflator estimates spliced to the Department of Commerce deflator series in the fourth quarter of 1946. Christopher Hanes (1999) argues that pre-Fed deflator estimates understate somewhat the serial correlation of pre-Fed inflation, while overstating the volatility of pre-Fed inflation, owing to their disproportionate reliance upon (relatively pro-cyclical) prices of “less-processed” goods. 7.

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James
Published 15 Jan 2023

The second looks like a mirror image: the inverted ⋂ of American productivity growth, or of the productive potential of the world’s leading and most dynamic economy. In the interwar period, notwithstanding the Great Depression, productivity surged, and the Second World War pushed that growth even faster. Then after the 1970s there was a slowdown, and as the economist Robert Gordon analyzed it, total-factor productivity grew only at a third of the extraordinary rate achieved between 1920 and 1970.130 There are three explanations for the interlocking U-curves: technical change, war, and the logic of deglobalization. In the first place, the extraordinary American development of the mid-century was driven by dramatic technical change (see Figure 4.2).

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-based factories without the outsourcing that has become common in the last several decades. The lack of competition from immigrants and imports boosted the wages of workers at the bottom of the income pyramid and contributed to the remarkable “great compression” of income distribution during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Robert Gordon concludes that it was the extensive deglobalization that laid the groundwork for an American Great Leap Forward (the terminology used by Alex Field in a satirical dig at communist China’s growth terminology).135 In other words, there was a demand push that followed from cutting off the labor market to further immigration, which may have pushed the technical change further.

End the Fed
by Ron Paul
Published 5 Feb 2011

My second question deals with productivity. There are various groups that have said that our statistics are off. Estevao and Lach claim, and this was written up in the St. Louis Fed pamphlet, that the temps aren’t considered and that distorts the views. Stephen Roach at Morgan Stanley said we don’t take into consideration overtime. Robert Gordon of Northwestern University says that 99 percent of the productivity benefits were in the computer industry and had very little to do with the general economy, and therefore, we should not be anxious to reassure ourselves that the productive increases will protect us from future corrections that could be rather serious.

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right
by Philippe Legrain
Published 22 Apr 2014

The low-hanging fruit have all been picked, argues Tyler Cowen in The Great Stagnation.706 Nothing can ever compare to the great leap forward ushered in by electricity and other advances during the second wave of the Industrial Revolution between 1870 and 1900, such as cars, running water, petroleum and chemicals, claims Robert Gordon of Northwestern University.707 “Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once – urbanisation, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying tons of water per year, and the role of central heating and air conditioning in achieving a year-round constant temperature.”

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Just think how much faster and further humanity could progress if Africa emulated China’s success, if women were liberated in the Arab world, if people were set free to live and work wherever they want, if Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial magic cast its spell on Europe, and if every young person got a fair start in life. Knowledge is cumulative: by standing on the shoulders of giants we can reach ever-higher branches. Each invention also creates new demands, argues Jan Mokyr, an optimistic counterpoint to Robert Gordon at Northwestern University.709 Antibiotics have given us a new lease of life, but as bacteria become resistant, we need to develop new ones. Using nitrates as fertilisers helped us feed billions but their overuse pollutes the water; perhaps the solution will be genetic engineering to enable plants to fix more of their own nitrates or bacteria that convert nitrates into nitrogen at more efficient rates.

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis
by Martin Wolf
Published 24 Nov 2015

But the other component of economic growth – rising productivity – is even more important than demography in determining the rate of growth over the long run. It is also the principal determinant of incomes per head. Nobody knows what will happen to productivity over the coming decades, but some well-informed people have put forward reasonable arguments that it must slow. Among these are Robert Gordon of Northwestern University and Tyler Cowen of George Mason University.34 An important reason why the pace of innovation might be slowing is that many opportunities have already been exploited: the population of the high-income countries is already highly educated and highly urbanized; the economy has already exploited the most readily available natural resources; people have already enjoyed the fruit of many life- and economy-transforming innovations, such as running water and sanitation, inoculation, electricity, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, civil aviation, telephony, the computer and the internet.

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See Robert Arnott and Denis Chaves, ‘A New “New Normal” in Demography and Economic Growth’, 27 August 2013, http://www.indexuniverse.com/docs/magazine/2/2013_229.pdf. 33. See International Monetary Fund, Fiscal Adjustment in an Uncertain World, Fiscal Monitor, April 2013, Fig. 2, p. 6. 34. See Robert Gordon, ‘Is U. S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 18315, August 2012, www.nber.org; TylerCowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (London: Dutton/Penguin, 2011). 35.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

Between 1891 and 1972, US productivity (measured as output per hour) improved at an average annual rate of 2.36%. That helps explain why America became so wealthy. After 1972, the improvement slowed to 1.38%. For a brief period between 1996 and 2004, there was another surge to 2.54%. This was the time of the dotcom boom. But after 2004, the rate slowed right back again.18 Robert Gordon, an economist, argues that the latest wave of innovation is more limited than the first, steam-based, industrial revolution, or the second, based on electric power and cars. The new wave has been based on entertainment, information and communications.19 Other changes have been much more limited.

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Claudia Goldin, “The role of World War II in the rise of women’s work”, NBER working paper 3203, https://www.nber.org/papers/w3203.pdf 98. Smil, Energy and Civilisation, op. cit. 99. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “The diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture 1910–1960”, NBER working paper 7947, www.nber.org/papers/w7947 100. Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War 101. Barbara Krasner-Khait, “The impact of refrigeration”, History Magazine, https://www.history-magazine.com/refrig.html 102. Frieden, Global Capitalism, op. cit. 103. St Clair, The Golden Thread, op. cit. 104.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It
by Steven Brill
Published 28 May 2018

Of those “66 most successful lawyers,” Reuters found, “51 worked for law firms that primarily represented corporate interests,” and “in cases pitting the interests of customers, employees or other individuals against those of companies, a leading attorney was three times more likely to launch an appeal for business than for an individual.” Writing in the Boston University Law Review in 1988, Stanford law professor Robert Gordon described that growing meritocratic arms race as a development akin to the fall of Western civilization: “The decision by Cravath, Swaine and Moore to inflate the salaries of first-year associates, a move instantly imitated by other New York firms and later by firms in other cities, has been one of the most anti-social acts of the bar in recent history,” he wrote.

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At another top law school: Columbia Law School employment summary for 2015 graduates, available here: http://www.law.columbia.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​microsites/​careers/​files/​2015_aba_employment_summary.pdf. “66 of the 17,000 lawyers”: Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts, and John Shiffman, “The Echo Chamber,” Reuters, December 8, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/​investigates/​special-report/​scotus/. Stanford law professor Robert Gordon: Robert W. Gordon, “The Independence of Lawyers,” Boston University Law Review 68 (1988), http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/​fss_papers/​1361. “The results for these kids” and subsequent quotes: Interviews with Marx. about 8 percent: Ibid. Amos Hostetter, Jr.: This assessment of his reputation is based on my own experience in the cable industry.

The Globalization of Inequality
by François Bourguignon
Published 1 Aug 2012

Some economists also predict a slowing down in the rate of technological progress which they believe may last for some time.2 On the other hand, even if some of them are partially affected by the slowed growth of rich countries, the emerging economies often have large domestic markets that offer Acemoglu et al., “Distance to Frontier, Selection, and Economic Growth.” 2 See, for instance, Robert Gordon, “Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds,” Working Paper 18315, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2012. 1 Globalization and Costly Inequality121 substantial and autonomous opportunities for growth. China’s current attempt to reorient its development toward domestic demand is a good example of this.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

CHAPTER 14: WE DON’T HAVE TO RUN OUT OF JOBS 298 “live wisely and agreeably and well”: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 358–73, available online from http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ 116a/keynes1.pdf. 298 the world has been getting better: Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “Global Extreme Poverty,” OurWorldIn Data.org, first published in 2013; substantive revision March 27, 2017, retrieved April 4, 2017, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/. 299 once destroyed factory jobs: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation,” Oxford Martin Institute, September 17, 2013, http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of _Employment.pdf. 299 the age of growth is over: Robert Gordon, “The Death of Innovation, the End of Growth,” TED 2013, https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gordon _the_death_of_innovation_the_end_of _growth. 301 something that had never been done before: Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (New York: William Morrow, 2016). 302 well-paid human jobs: Already, in the US, 43% of the electric power generation workforce is employed in solar technologies, versus 22% of electric power generation via fossil fuels.

End This Depression Now!
by Paul Krugman
Published 30 Apr 2012

Yet within two years the economy was booming, and unemployment was plunging. What happened? The answer is that finally someone began spending enough to get the economy humming again. That “someone” was, of course, the government. The object of that spending was basically destruction rather than construction; as the economists Robert Gordon and Robert Krenn put it, in the summer of 1940 the U.S. economy went to war. Long before Pearl Harbor, military spending soared as America rushed to replace the ships and other armaments sent to Britain as part of the lend-lease program, and as army camps were quickly built to house the millions of new recruits brought in by the draft.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella , Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols
Published 25 Sep 2017

It is a bias for driving investment toward technological advancements in services like LinkedIn and Office that help people create, connect, and become more productive rather than software that is simply entertaining—memes for conspicuous consumption. Spillover effects on the economy are pretty limited for technologies that don’t foster a more equitable ratio of consumption to creation. Nonetheless, Wall Street has put a lot of value recently on these consumption technologies. Robert Gordon’s recent economic treatise, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, has as its central thesis that some inventions are more important than others. I agree, and I would put today’s productivity software in that category. Gordon examines American growth between 1870 and 1940, describing a century of economic revolution that freed households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death.

Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools
by Participant Media and Karl Weber
Published 14 Jun 2010

Note: Graduation rates are for first-time, full-time students graduating in 150 percent normal time. 10 Becky Smerdon, Barbara Means, et al., Evaluation of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s High School Grants Initiative: 2001-2005 Final Report (Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research; Menlo Park, CA: SRI International, 2006). 11 Steven G. Rivkin, Eric A. Hanushek, and John F. Kain, “Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement,” Econometrica 73, no. 2 (March 2005): 417-458. 12 Robert Gordon, Thomas J. Kane, and Douglas O. Staiger, Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance on the Job (Washington, DC: Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, 2006). 13 Stephen Newton, “Stull Evaluations and Student Performance,” Los Angeles Unified School District, http://notebook.lausd.net/pls/ptl/docs/PAGE/CA_LAUSD/FLDR_ORGANIZATIONS/FLDR_PLCY_RES_DEV/PAR_DIVISION_MAIN/RESEARCH_UNIT/PUBLICATIONS/POLICY_REPORTS/IMPACT_STULL_186.PDF. 14 Kim Marshall, “It’s Time to Rethink Teacher Supervision and Evaluation,” Phi Delta Kappan, June 2005. 15 Scholastic and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Primary Sources: America’s Teachers on America’s Schools (New York: Scholastic Inc., 2010). 16 Marguerite Roza, Frozen Assets: Rethinking Teacher Contracts Could Free Billions for School Reform (Washington, DC: Education Sector, 2007). 17 Valerie Russ, “Teachers, School District Approve Contract,” Philadelphia Daily News, January 23, 2010. 18 Scholastic and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Primary Sources. 19 “Rocketship Education 2009 Academic Results Highest Performing in San Jose and Santa Clara County, Tops Palo Alto Unified,” www.rsed.org/news/RSED%2009%20Results%20Release%209.16%20FINAL.doc. 20 Mike Feinberg, personal communications, 2010.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

Asymco Blog http://www.asymco.com/2013/11/18/seeing-whats-next-2/ 108 The acceleration of technology is admittedly a contested point, with authors like Cowan, Thiel, and Gordon notably identifying the problem of economic stagnation. Cowan, Tyler (2011) The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better Thiel, Peter (2014) Zero to One. Gordon, Robert J. (2012) Why Innovation Won't Save Us http://economics.weinberg.northwestern.edu/robert-gordon/WSJ_121222.pdf 109 A kilobyte here is actually 1024 bytes, not 1000, so the conversion is not straight-forward in decimal math as it might appear, moreover while disk drives use metric definitions of kilo (=1000), memory makers use the kilo = 1024 = 210. 110 According to the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, 56% of all American adults are now smartphone adopters; one-third (35%) have some other kind of cell phone that is not a smartphone, and the remaining 9% of Americans do not own a cell phone at all, see: http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/06/05/smartphone-ownership-2013/ 111 In contrast, for 43 years of his life, Kevin was without a cell phone.

Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own
by Garett Jones
Published 15 Feb 2015

But once again, the power of patience will come to the rescue: once again, groups that are more patient will be more likely to reap the rewards of a better economy, while the less patient will be stuck in the one-shot world of suboptimal plans. Patience can make the optimal plan into a time consistent plan. Economists Robert Barro and Robert Gordon were early to point this out. If you take Kydland and Prescott’s simple two-period story and lengthen it out to an endless number of periods, then you find yourself in a world in which reputation matters.12 And fortunately, that theoretical world is exactly like the real world: just as your grandmother taught you, a good reputation is worth many rubies.

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet
by Nina Teicholz
Published 12 May 2014

Barbour, “The Deposition and Utilization of Hydrogenation Isoleic Acid in the Animal Body,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 10, no. 1 (1933): 71. grew more slowly: A. K. Pickat, “The Nutritive Value of Margarine and Soy Bean-Oil,” Voprosy Pitaniia 2, no. 5 (1933): 34–60. yin-yang of conflicting results: Kenneth P. McConnel and Robert Gordon Sinclair, “Passage of Elaidic Acid through the Placenta and Also into the Milk of the Rat,” Journal of Biological Chemistry 118, no. 1 (1937): 118–129; E. Aaes-Jørgensen et al., “The Role of Fat in the Diet of Rats,” British Journal of Nutrition 10, no. 4 (1956): 292–304. was a 1944 study: H.

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Rupp, and Vincent Toscani. “Prolonged Meat Diets with a Study of the Metabolism of Nitrogen, Calcium, and Phosporus.” Journal of Biological Chemistry 87, no. 3 (July 1930): 669–680. McCollum, Elmer Verner. The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition. New York: MacMillan, 1921. McConnell, Kenneth P. and Robert Gordon Sinclair. “Passage of Elaidic Acid Through the Placenta and Also into the Milk of the Rat.” Journal of Biological Chemistry 118, no. 1 (1937): 123–129. McGill, Henry C., C. Alex McMahan, Edward E. Herderick, Gray T. Malcom, Richard E. Tracy, and Jack P. Strong. “Origin of Atherosclerosis in Childhood and Adolescence.”

Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford
Published 16 Nov 2018

If we think productivity growth matters right now for our current growth, which it does, it’s going to matter even more for the next 50 years if we still want economic growth and prosperity. MARTIN FORD: This is kind of touching on the economist Robert Gordon’s argument that may be there’s not going to be much economic growth in the future. (Robert Gordon’s 2017 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, offers a very pessimistic view of future economic growth in the United States) JAMES MANYIKA: While Bob Gordon’s saying there may not be economic growth, he’s also questioning whether we’re going to have big enough innovations, comparable to electrification and other things like that, to really drive economic growth.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

Moreover, measurement problems cannot account for the current productivity slowdown; industries with greater investment in digital technologies show neither differential productivity deceleration nor any evidence of faster quality improvements than those that are less digital. A few economists, such as Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, believe that this disappointing productivity performance reflects dwindling opportunities for revolutionary breakthroughs. In contrast to techno-optimists, they claim, the great innovations are behind us, and improvements from now on will be incremental, leading only to slow productivity growth.

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Hatzius, “We think it…,” is from Pethokoukis (2016). See also Pethokoukis (2017b). Evidence that manufacturing industries investing more in digital technologies are not showing faster productivity growth or any evidence of more mismeasurement is from Acemoglu, Autor, Dorn, Hanson, and Price (2014). Robert Gordon’s views are in Gordon (2016). For Tyler Cowen’s views, see Cowen (2010). The discussion of Japanese robot adoption and later attempts to introduce flexibility is provided in Krzywdzinski (2021). On the Fremont plant before and after Toyota’s investments and comparisons to other US car manufacturers, see Shimada and MacDuffie (1986) and MacDuffie and Krafcik (1992).

Social Democratic America
by Lane Kenworthy
Published 3 Jan 2014

Moreover, even if productivity growth is sluggish in low-end services, it may, as Baumol himself points out, be rapid in other parts of the economy.44 Technological advance and improvements in work organization can yield leaps forward. The computer and communications revolutions already have generated considerable advance in manufacturing, finance, and an array of other services. They will soon do so in medicine, education, and elsewhere. In recent years, several analysts, including Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen, have expressed pessimism about the likelihood of further productivity-enhancing innovations.45 The information technology revolution has largely run its course, they say, and in any case it never boosted productivity to the same degree as earlier innovations such as steam engines, railroads, electricity, the assembly line, indoor heating and air conditioning, running water, sewers, roads, and the internal combustion engine.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl
Published 7 May 2018

Martin Sandbu, ‘The problem is not too many robots, but too few’, Financial Times (4 April 2017), http://www.ft.com/content/bcb600d4–1870–11e7-a53d- df09f373be87, archived at https://perma.cc/QCX5-4K6N 70. See, e.g., Paul Krugman, ‘Robot geometry (very wonkish)’, Financial Times (20 March 2017), https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/robot-geome- try-very-wonkish, archived at https://perma.cc/KGF7-YKRS; Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton University Press 2016). 71. Uber contests these allegations: Mike Isaac, ‘How Uber deceives the authorities worldwide’, The New York Times (3 March 2017), http://www.nytimes. com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-programme-evade-authorities.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be
by Diane Coyle
Published 11 Oct 2021

The advance of the new technologies presents a paradox, one greatly exercising economists at present. This is the so-called productivity puzzle. Labour productivity—GDP per hour worked—or equally the multifactor productivity measuring the increase in GDP not attributable to the use of additional capital and labour—has flatlined since the mid-2000s. Some economists, notably Robert Gordon (2016), see no paradox, dismissing the technology as all hype. Although there is without question plenty of hype, others (including me) are burrowing into the statistics to try to understand better how an increasingly weightless economy of zeroes and ones is being reflected, or not, in the standard economic statistics.

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
by Richard Florida
Published 28 Jun 2009

“More astonishing still,” noted journalist Clive Crook in a 2006 article for the Atlantic Monthly, is that “from 1997 to 2001, the top 1 percent captured far more of the real national gain in wage and salary income than did the bottom 50 percent. And even within that highest percentile, the gains were heavily concentrated at the top.” See Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon, “Where Did the Productivity Growth Go? Inflation Dynamics and the Distribution of Income,” presented to the Brookings Institution, September 2005. Robert Frank, Falling Behind: How Inequality Harms the Middle Class, University of California Press, 2007. Clive Crook, “The Height of Inequality,” Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, pp. 36-37. 2 Herbert Muschamp, “Checking into Escapism,” New York Times, November 2, 2002. 3 Greg Spencer and Tara Vinodrai, “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone: Assessing Talent Flows between Canadian Cities,” ISRN Annual Meeting, May 2, 2008. 4 Bethan Thomas and Danny Dorling, Identity in Britain: A Cradle-to-Grave Atlas, Polity Press, 2007.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

But when the patent runs out, the price of the same medicine falls to pennies and the product essentially vanishes from the economy. If you think technology is accelerating faster than ever before, as many do, then the mismeasurement problem is getting worse. But there are serious academics who contend that the really important advances in technology are all behind us. Robert Gordon, an expert on productivity at Northwestern University, argues that all the truly transformative inventions came about after 1870 and more or less ran out of steam around 1970. He cites the invention of electricity and the internal combustion engine, and the provision of clean water and sewage disposal.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines
by William Davidow and Michael Malone
Published 18 Feb 2020

By the mid-1960s, semiconductor technology was already creating industries that never would have existed without it—ultimately billion- and trillion-dollar ones. One of the defining characteristics of the monetizable productivity increases of the past was that they created even larger increases in the value of the GDP. According to the economist Robert Gordon, U.S. productivity grew at an annual rate of 2.82 percent between 1920 and 1970.16 During that same interval, GDP increased by more than 3.2 percent.17 When GDP grows faster than productivity it generates a demand for more workers. Thus, the old productivity created not only more dollars of economic output but also jobs.

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Published 16 Jan 2018

“The simple fact of the matter”: Danielle Allen, “Charlottesville Is Not the Continuation of an Old Fight. It Is Something New,” Washington Post, August 13, 2017. The intensity of partisan animosities: Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Today’s racially tinged partisan polarization: Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 613. economic changes of the last few decades: Katherine Kramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 3.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

The fact that all the remarkable progress in computing and the internet does not, by itself, measure up to the expectation that the kind of broad-based progress seen in earlier decades would continue unabated is captured in Peter Thiel’s famous quip that “we were promised flying cars and instead we got 140 characters.” The argument that we have been living in an age of relative stagnation—even as information technology has continued to accelerate—has been articulated at length by the economists Tyler Cowen, who published his book The Great Stagnation in 2011,64 and Robert Gordon, who sketches out a very pessimistic future for the United States in his 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth.65 A key argument in both books is that the low-hanging fruit of technological innovation had been largely harvested by roughly the 1970s. The result is that we are now in a technological lull defined by a struggle to reach the higher branches of the innovation tree.

The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells
Published 31 Aug 1996

Economic Policy Institute: Fig. 4.8 “Employment in the temporary help industry in the United States, 1982–1997,” analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and John Schmitt, The State of Working America 1998–99. Copyright © Cornell University Press/Economic Policy Institute, Ithaca and London. The Economist: Fig. 2.2 “Estimate of evolution of productivity in the United States, 1972–1999 (output per hour),” Bureau of Labor Statistics, elaborated by Robert Gordon in “The new economy: work in progress,” in The Economist, pp. 21–4. Copyright © 1999 The Economist, London (24 July). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. The Economist: Fig. 2.9 “Declining dividends payments,” in “Shares without the other bit” in The Economist, p. 135. Copyright © The Economist, London (20 November).

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And yet, even the statistical evidence provided to refute the notion of significant productivity increase, associated with information technology, seems to confirm the new trend in upward productivity growth, on the condition that data are interpreted in a dynamic perspective. Thus, the study most often cited to object to an upturn of productivity growth in the late 1990s is the one posted on the Internet in 1999 by a leading productivity economist, Robert Gordon.31 As shown in figure 2.2 and table 2.5, Gordon observed un upswing in productivity growth in the 1995–9 period, at about 2.15 percent per year, almost doubling the performance during 1972–95. However, decomposing productivity growth by sectors, he found that the overwhelming proportion of productivity growth was concentrated in computer manufacturing, which increased its productivity in 1995–9 at the stunning rate of 41.7 percent per year.

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age
by Lizabeth Cohen
Published 30 Sep 2019

New Haven Human Rights Committee, “Report of Findings and Recommendations 12–14,” 1964, in Ellickson, Urban Legal History, 590.   49. Rae, City, 340–43. Also, Family Relocation Office, “Report of the Progress of Family Relocations in Oak Street Redevelopment Area,” March 10, 1957, cited in Gregory Ruben (paper for Robert Gordon on lawyers in urban renewal of New Haven, June 2006 draft), 36n184, in possession of the author.   50. For a thorough investigation of the state of black organizations in New Haven, see Williams, Black Politics/White Power, chapters 1–3. The Reverend Edwin Edmonds, a civil rights activist from North Carolina, criticized the moderate views of New Haven’s civil rights leaders when he became the minister of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church in 1959: “This was one backward town”; Rev.

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I am grateful to Alan Altshuler, Hillary Ballon, Frank Barrett, David Barron, Paul Bass, Jonathan Bell, Nicholas Bloom, Peter Bray, Robert Caro, Michael Carriere, Sue Cobble, Nancy Cott, John Davis, Jameson Doig, Claire Dunning, Robert Ellikson, Louise Endel, Susan Fainstein, Justin Florence, Eric Foner, Gerald Frug, John Gaddis, Gary Gerstle, Jess Gilbert, Glenda Gilmore, Edward Glaeser, Brian Goldstein, Linda Gordon, Robert Gordon, Chris Grimley, Michael Gruenbaum, Dirk Hartog, Dolores Hayden, Diana Hernandez, Jennifer Hock, Andy Horowitz, Ada Louise Huxtable, Ken Jackson, Jerold Kayden, Alice Kessler-Harris, Jim Kloppenberg, Alex Krieger, Michael Kubo, Clifford Kuhn, Matthew Lasner, Stephen Lassonde, Deborah Leff, Neil Levine, David Luberoff, Elisa Minoff, John Mollenkopf, Mitchell Moss, Dan Okrent, Mark Pasnik, Alina Payne, Alan Plattus, Douglas Rae, Tim Rohan, Mark Rose, Lynne Sagalyn, Nick Salvatore, Hashim Sarkis, Chris Schmidt, Jane Shaw, Gaddis Smith, Jonathan Soffer, Tim Stanley, Robert Stern, Tom Sugrue, Mary Summers, Adam Tanaka, Lawrence Vale, Jim Vrabel, David Wylie, and Elizabeth Ylvisaker.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

For better or worse, the narrative that persuades these countries’ governments and publics will determine their future – and that of the global economy.205 Whether the advanced countries would be able anyway to revive innovation and productivity growth is an open question. Northwestern University’s Robert Gordon has forecast a slower rate of productivity improvement in the US than in the past because there is nothing in prospect that matches the huge changes wrought by such advances as steam power, railways, electrification, the internal combustion engine, or even such simple things as running water and home sanitation.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

a) Comedian Charlie Williams b) Dennis Wheatley c) Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle d) Ali Bongo Question 18: In Michael Gove’s 1985 poem “Larking About”, where do the sexually active teenage boys he both despises and envies store their vomit? a) In sealed Tupperware boxes b) In pint glasses c) In their heads d) In their souls Question 27: What was Michael Gove describing when he said, “The cure might be worse than the disease”? a) Going to bed wearing boxing gloves while a pupil at Robert Gordon’s College, Aberdeen b) Extra regulation of the press c) Having his consistently bitten fingernails smeared with earwax by Matron. d) Ed Balls Question 104: The verb “gove” means … a) To stare like a fool b) To predict the future c) To tame ferrets, shrews or weasels d) To take plums from trees without consent It was too perfect.

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

Techno-optimists, such as the McKinsey authors, look at such numbers as an opportunity: there remain vast productivity gains to be had from the adoption of new technologies in the lagging sectors. The pessimists, on the other hand, think that such gaps may be a structural, lasting feature of today’s economies. For example, the economic historian Robert Gordon argues that today’s innovations pale in contrast to past technological revolutions in terms of their likely economy-wide impact.15 Electricity, the automobile, airplane, air-conditioning, and household appliances altered the way that ordinary people live in fundamental ways. They made inroads in every sector of the economy.

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car
by Tim Harford
Published 15 Mar 2006

The most famous bullish book was James Glassman and Kevin Hassett’s Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market (New York: Times Books, 1999); the authors defend it in the Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2002, “Dow 36,000 revisited,” available at http://www.aei.org/news/ filter.,newsID.14128/news_detail.asp) and http://www.techcentralstation.com/ 120504A.html. The prediction that the Dow will hit 36,000 in 3 to 5 years is made • 257 • N O T E S on page 18 of “Dow 36,000,” and economist Brad DeLong is extremely dismissive: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005_archives/000025.html. How transformational is the “new economy”? Robert Gordon has given the definitive skeptical statement in “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4, no.14 (Fall 2000): 49–74. Paul David’s argument that new technology takes time to have a real economic impact is most famously expounded in “The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox,” The American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, May 1990, 355–61.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

Worst of all, it has created a plutocracy and plutocratic corporations linked to concentrated financial capital that are able to gain increasing amounts of rental income by virtue of their wealth. Meanwhile, wages are stagnating. With China, India and other major industrialising economies becoming centres of employment, that stagnation will continue. US economist Robert Gordon has added to the gloomy prognosis about future changes in living standards for those relying on labour, noting that US productivity growth has slowed to a dawdle.57 It promises to be the same in Europe and Japan and it will stay that way. The old income distribution system that tied income to jobs has disintegrated.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World
by Sandra Navidi
Published 24 Jan 2017

The think tank Club of Rome argued in its 1972 research report The Limits to Growth that growth cannot continue indefinitely because resources like water, food, and energy are limited. More-recent research has only corroborated this theory, concluding that the drive for limitless economic growth could disrupt many local, regional and global systems and would end either through an uncontrolled collapse or human adaptation.46 Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon predicts significantly slower growth for the foreseeable future, because the most significant innovations that triggered disproportionate growth over the last 150 years—such as the internal combustion engine, running water, and electricity—were in his opinion unique and unrepeatable.47 Culture: The Value of Our Values To a certain extent the drive for growth is expedient, as the economy is like a plane that must fly at a certain speed to stay airborne.

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
by Thomas Geoghegan
Published 20 Sep 2011

(Then, after that, we can focus on Barbara and Isabel in their respectively well-off but not superrich lifestyles.) Okay—first let’s start squeezing some of the “fat” out of Barbara’s GDP per capita. We have to put our GDP on a diet, or deflate some of the bloat in it, before we can decide which woman is better off. Let’s take a nonpolitical thing, like the weather. Robert Gordon, one of our leading economists, a professor at Northwestern, makes the point about heat and air-conditioning in the U.S.: the extremes in our weather help pump up our GDP. We spend more on oil, coal, even water. Like Sherman’s army, the whole U.S. population is moving to the South, where it’s ever hotter.

Drugs Without the Hot Air
by David Nutt
Published 30 May 2012

It is used every day in every aspect of life sciences, including forensic investigation and medical diagnosis. 17 There are many other kinds of psychedelic drugs• High Society, Mike Jay, Thames & Hudson, 2010 18 few recorded incidents of people taking them accidentally• As above. 19 Valeda mushroom ceremony in Mexico• Seeking the magic mushroom, Robert Gordon Wasson, Life Magazine, June 10th 1957 20 a licence once someone has participated in a workshop, or perhaps passed a test, to ensure that they know how to use them safely• Will Harvard drop acid again?, Peter Bebergal, URL-121, June 9th 2008 15 The War on Drugs, and drugs in war 1“Public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and an architect of bank deregulation, shook the economics world in 2013 by warning that the West faced ‘secular stagnation’ – that is, low growth for the foreseeable future. ‘Unfortunately,’ he admitted, low growth ‘has been present for a long time, but has been masked by unsustainable finances’.15 Veteran US economist Robert Gordon went further, predicting persistent low growth in the USA for the next twenty-five years, as a result of lower productivity, an ageing population, high debts and growing inequality.16 Remorselessly, capitalism’s failure to revive has moved concerns away from the scenario of a ten-year stagnation caused by overhanging debts, towards one where the system never regains its dynamism.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

So to the extent that the discount rate falls, expected future cashflows should fall as well. 20 Grantham, ‘Night of the Living Fed’. 8. RIDING THE GRAVY TRAIN 1 J. K. Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, 2nd edn, London, 1995. 2 Lawrence Mishel, ‘CEO-to-Worker Pay Imbalance Grows’, Economic Policy Institute, June 2006. 3 Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon, ‘Where Did the Productivity Growth Go? Inflation Dynamics and the Distribution of Income’, National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 11842. 4 Edward N. Wolff, ‘Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle Class Squeeze’, an update to 2007 Working Paper no. 589, Levy Economics Institute, March 2010. 5 Raghuram Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Threaten the World Economy, Princeton, 2010. 6 ‘Finance, Financial Sector Policies and Long-Run Growth’, by Asli Demir-guc-Kunt of the World Bank and Ross Levine of Brown University. 7 Adair Turner, ‘What do banks do?

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

If we look at the last few decades, we find even lower growth rates in the wealthiest countries: between 1990 and 2012, per capita output grew at a rate of 1.6 percent in Western Europe, 1.4 percent in North America, and 0.7 percent in Japan.21 It is important to bear this reality in mind as I proceed, because many people think that growth ought to be at least 3 or 4 percent per year. As noted, both history and logic show this to be illusory. With these preliminaries out of the way, what can we say about future growth rates? Some economists, such as Robert Gordon, believe that the rate of growth of per capita output is destined to slow in the most advanced countries, starting with the United States, and may sink below 0.5 percent per year between 2050 and 2100.22 Gordon’s analysis is based on a comparison of the various waves of innovation that have succeeded one another since the invention of the steam engine and introduction of electricity, and on the finding that the most recent waves—including the revolution in information technology—have a much lower growth potential than earlier waves, because they are less disruptive to modes of production and do less to improve productivity across the economy.

…

The history of the past two centuries makes it highly unlikely that per capita output in the advanced countries will grow at a rate above 1.5 percent per year, but I am unable to predict whether the actual rate will be 0.5 percent, 1 percent, or 1.5 percent. The median scenario I will present here is based on a long-term per capita output growth rate of 1.2 percent in the wealthy countries, which is relatively optimistic compared with Robert Gordon’s predictions (which I think are a little too dark). This level of growth cannot be achieved, however, unless new sources of energy are developed to replace hydrocarbons, which are rapidly being depleted.23 This is only one scenario among many. An Annual Growth of 1 Percent Implies Major Social Change In my view, the most important point—more important than the specific growth rate prediction (since, as I have shown, any attempt to reduce long-term growth to a single figure is largely illusory)—is that a per capita output growth rate on the order of 1 percent is in fact extremely rapid, much more rapid than many people think.

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 8 Nov 2016

For illustration I will point to five systemic disorders of today’s advanced capitalism; all of them result in various ways from the weakening of traditional institutional and political restraints on capitalist advance. I call them stagnation, oligarchic redistribution, the plundering of the public domain, corruption and global anarchy. Six years after Lehman, predictions of long-lasting economic stagnation are en vogue. A prominent example is a much-discussed paper by Robert Gordon, who argues that the main innovations that have driven productivity and economic growth since the 1800s could happen only once, like the increase in the speed of transportation or the installation of running water in cities.29 Compared to them, the recent spread of information technology has produced only minor productivity effects, if any.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

(“Technology” includes more than just machines. It also includes things like laws, regulations and business models.) Depending on whether I harvest my crop with a two-handed scythe or with a GPS-guided combine, the number—the value of one hour’s work—will vary quite a lot. Right now, this number is worrisome. In 2012 Robert Gordon, a guru of US growth economics, pored over a century of US productivity data and concluded that all our recent technological achievements don’t amount to much in real terms. For the first 80 years of his study, from 1891 to 1972, US labor productivity grew about 2.3 percent per year. That’s sizzling-fast in macroeconomic terms (at that rate, productivity doubles with each new generation), and its speed and duration are proof that the technological changes to which those generations bore witness totally transformed their lives for the better.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
by Marc Levinson
Published 31 Jul 2016

While some wealthy countries seemed to have found formulas that allowed them to defy the global trend—France and Italy for a few years in the late 1970s, Japan in the second half of the 1980s—their economies revived only briefly before productivity growth waned, jobs became scarce, and improvements in living standards came far more slowly. There were innovations aplenty during those years, but their overall economic effect was modest. As the economist Robert Gordon points out, “the productivity advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down.”

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

The breakthrough was not in travel but in communications. The distance abolished was the kind that is in people’s heads. Looked at this way, computers have been not so much an expression of America’s historic ingenuity as an alternative to it. In his history of economic growth in the United States, the Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon found no special productivity boost from the computer age. Outside of Silicon Valley, according to the economist Edmund Phelps, American innovation “would narrow to a trickle” after the 1960s. In 1969, U.S. Industries, Inc., had promised that within a decade the 1960s would seem like the Dark Ages, once Americans got used to “automatic highways—computerized kitchens—person-to-person television . . . food from under the sea.”

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

What if the reluctance of businesses to invest and consumers to spend was not just a cyclical downturn but a more entrenched change in economic fundamentals? The term ‘secular stagnation’ re-emerged – it had first been used in 1939 – to reflect precisely these possibilities.51 For the most part, fears of secular stagnation have been directed at the advanced economies. US economist Robert Gordon has suggested that a slowdown in the US economy could come about as a result of a decline in the pace of innovation – many of the big technological advances of the last two centuries are now over – together with six ‘deflationary headwinds’, which are taken to include: an ageing population, rising inequality and the ‘overhang’ of consumer and government debt.52 Irrespective of precise causes, it is indisputable that labour productivity growth in the advanced economies has been falling consistently for several decades, and was doing so long before the financial crisis.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year. So who are the winners from rising inequality? It’s not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that. A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, “Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?,” gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Outside the weightless world of code See, for example, Michael Bhaskar, Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2021); Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011); and Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017), among many others. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT César Hidalgo argues César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (London: Allen Lane, 2015).

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds,” Policy Insight 63 (September 2012), Centre for Economic Policy Research, http://www.cepr.org/sites/default/files/policy_insights/PolicyInsight63.pdf. 45.Robert J. Gordon, “The Demise of U.S. Economic Growth: Restatement, Rebuttal, and Reflections,” NBER Working Paper No. 19895, February 2014, National Bureau of Economic Research, http://www.nber.org/papers/w19895. 46.“Robert Gordon, Erik Brynjolfsson Debate the Future of Work at TED 2013,” TED Blog video, April 23, 2013, https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=ofWK5WglgiI. 47.Robert J. Gordon, “Why Innovation Won’t Save Us,” Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324461604578191781756437940. 48.Gordon, “The Demise of U.S.

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide)
by Lucy Corne
Published 1 Sep 2015

These were the unmarked graves of slaves and others executed by the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries on what was then known as Gallows Hill. The bones were exhumed and this memorial building, with an attractive facade of Robben Island slate, was created. It includes an ossuary and excellent interpretive displays, including a replica of the remarkable 360-degree panorama of Table Bay painted by Robert Gordon in 1778. There's a branch of the coffee shop Truth ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.truthcoffee.com; Prestwich Memorial, cnr Somerset & Buitengracht Sts, De Waterkant; h8am-6pm Mon-Fri, to 2pm Sat & Sun; gStrand) in the memorial building. Prestwich Memorial GardenSCULPTURE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; cnr Somerset & Buitengracht Sts, De Waterkant; gStrand) Along the Walk of Remembrance (formerly known as the 2010 World Cup's Fan Walk) and one end of the proposed City Walk attraction is this attractive public space dotted with a collection of quirky sculptures and installations by Capetonian artists, including the rainbow arch It’s Beautiful Here by Heath Nash, the Full Cycle Tree by KEAG and several Rock Girl benches.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

It is not yet clear that trend growth is picking up meaningfully around the world; in fact, an examination of its component parts suggests the opposite. No Growth No More One of the better, more coherent explanations for the troubling lack of organic economic growth comes from Professor Robert Gordon. Gordon’s central thesis is that many of the innovations we prize today do not generate increases in productivity, and those that do are less impactful on economic growth than previous waves of innovation (in transportation and urbanization, for instance). Social media are an example. Gordon asks whether people would rather do without older innovations, such as indoor toilets and running water, or their Facebook accounts.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century
by Torben Iversen and David Soskice
Published 5 Feb 2019

It may even encourage the creation of better and more fulfilling jobs. Yet socio-pessimism is never far behind in the techno-optimist world, because automation is feared to bring “not less work but more worse jobs,” resulting in a “huge, casual, insecure, low paid workforce” (Wajcman 2017, 124). At the most socio-optimistic end is the major new book by Robert Gordon (2016), a techno-pessimist, who sees new IC technologies as merely modest additional layers in a history of economic change marked by more profound inventions such as electricity, telephony, and the internal combustion engine. Gordon argues that productivity growth has declined and that more, not less, work will be needed to sustain an aging population.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

But it was Cameron’s Eton friend Ed Llewellyn, two years above him and in the same year as Boris Johnson, whom the future prime minister relied on as his closest confidant and subsequently made his chief of staff. Osborne also opted for an OE as his chief of staff, former head boy Rupert Harrison. This clique of Young Turk Tories worked and played together. They even holidayed together. Among their number were Michael Gove (Robert Gordon’s), Chris Lockwood (St Paul’s) as well as journalists and PR gurus including Robert Hardman and Matthew D’Ancona (St Dunstan’s).28 They met whenever the occasion allowed, including hunt meets in Devon and then near Chipping Norton, where the Camerons later moved.29 Most of the group were invited to Cameron’s wedding to Samantha (St Helen and St Katharine, and Marlborough College).30 This band of policy researchers and advisers secured a velvet revolution in the leadership and direction of the new Conservative Party.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

When economists have measured this, they’ve found that the growth rate of total factor productivity in the United States has been generally declining over the last fifty years.10 Qualitatively, too, it seems that rates of technological progress have slowed down. To see this, consider a thought experiment from the economic historian Robert Gordon. Imagine you are a typical inhabitant of the United States in 1870.11 You live on a rural farm; you produce most of your food and clothing yourself. Your only sources of light are candles, whale oil, and gas lamps if you’re lucky. If you’re a man, you face gruelling physical labour, sometimes from the age of twelve onwards.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

[Yet] it achieves what usually only love can do: the divination of the innermost wishes of the other, even before he himself becomes aware of them. . . . Modern competition is described as the fight of all against all, but at the same time it is the fight of all for all.13 8 Or from the Right and Middle And there are doubts from the right, too. Some students of the economy, such as Robert Gordon, Lawrence Summers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McFee, Edmund Phelps, Edward E. Gordon, Jeffrey Sachs, Laurence Kotlikoff, and Tyler Cowen, have argued recently that countries in the position of the United States, on the frontier of betterment, are facing a slowdown, with a skill shortage, and that technological unemployment will be the result.1 Maybe.

…

Ibsen 1877 (1965), p. 117. 10. Postrel has written the book on glamour (2013). 11. Zola 1882–1883 (1992), pp. 68–70. 12. Quoted in Kristin Ross’s introduction to Zola 1882–1883 (1992), pp. xi–xii; the italics are Zola’s. 13. Simmel 1908 (1955), pp. 61–62; his italics. Chapter 8 1. Robert Gordon 2012; Summers 2014; Brynjolfsson and McFee 2014; Phelps 2013; Edward Gordon 2013; Sachs and Kotlikoff 2012; Cowen 2011, 2013. 2. Fogel 2005. 3. National Review, May 19, 2014. 4. Cowen 2013, pp. 4, 6. 5. Cowen 2013, p.20. 6. Cowen 2013, p. 39. 7. Cowen 2013, p. 3. 8.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

If smart technology doesn’t improve our productivity, we might not be able to pay for further improvements in energy efficiency. Many hope for a return to the “New Economy” of the late 1990s, when the United States experienced a historic period of rapid increases in productivity driven, we thought, by advances in information technology. But recent research has questioned this explanation. Robert Gordon at Northwestern University notes that the greatest productivity gains from information technology during that expansion were in manufacturing of durable goods, and that it was small in historical terms. “Computers and the internet do not measure up to the Great Inventions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,” he argued, “and in this sense do not merit the label of ‘Industrial Revolution.”81 Furthermore, these gains soon disappeared and most developed economies saw little productivity growth during the 2000s.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

Markets always created jobs, as the economy restructured. Besides, these techno-optimists claim, the pace of change has been exaggerated. Indeed, it doesn’t even show in the macro-data: productivity increases in recent years are significantly lower than in the 1990s, and in the decades after World War II. Robert Gordon of Northwestern University in his bestselling book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War argues that the pace of innovation has actually slowed.2 Yes, we have Facebook and Google, but these innovations pale in comparison with the importance of electricity, or even indoor toilets and clean water that played such an important role in improving health and longevity.

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1990

Pennoyer and Frances Tracy Pennoyer, interview with author. 51. Sinclair, Corsair, p. 115. 52. Ibid., p. 22. 53. Smalley, Anglo-American Memories, p. 230. 54. Josephson, Money Lords, p. 15. 55. Sinclair, Corsair, p. 22. 56. Smalley, Anglo-American Memories, p. 230. 57. NYT, February 19, 1964. 58. TWL, Box 110, Folder 3, memorandum to Robert Gordon Wasson, March 27, 1939. 59. Carosso, Morgans, p. 465. 60. Schacht, Confessions of the Old Wizard, pp. 97–98. 61. Carosso, Morgans, p. 366. 62. Ibid., p. 365 63. Winkler, Morgan the Magnificent, p. 116. 64. Moody, Masters of Capital, p. 29. 65. Leffingwell, Memorial of Charles Steele. 66.

…

JPMJ, Box 32, cable to J. P. Morgan, Sr., June 23, 1911. 71. SEP, August 26, 1922. 72. NYT, December 16, 1956. Sinclair, Corsair, p. 207. 73. JSM, Extracts of Correspondence—Edward C. Grenfell—Count Maurice de Bosdari, p. 88. 74. RCL, Group 1030, Series I, Box 7, Folder 169, memorandum to Robert Gordon Wasson, February 23, 1945. CHAPTER SEVEN: PANIC 1. JPMJ, Box 31, cable to J. P. Morgan, Sr., March 25, 1907. 2. Ibid., cable from J. P. Morgan, Sr., March 25, 1907. 3. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 436. 4. Garraty, Right-Hand Man, p. 206. 5. Chandler, Benjamin Strong, p. 28. 6.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
by Doug Henwood
Published 30 Aug 1998

It may be that as capitalist economies mature, and liquid balances swell, they may tend toward a more fluid style of finance and ownership. irrational expectations Information asymmetry theorists generally assume that market participants are the rational self-maximizers of mainstream theory; they can just never be certain of the knowledge and motives of their counterparts. As Robert Gordon said of the closely related New Keynesian school, "any attempt to build a model based on irrational behavior or submaximizing behavior is viewed as cheating" (quoted in Dymski 1994). While it's safe to believe that financial players are self-maximizers, their rationality is another matter. Academic students of finance have increasingly recognized that lots of old-fashioned impressionistic notions about market volatility may be truer than rationalists could imagine.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century
by George Gilder
Published 30 Apr 1981

Walter Eltis of Oxford University broached it in his important book, written with Robert Bacon, Britain’s Economic Problem: Too Few Producers. It first surfaced in the United States, perhaps, at a conference on inflation and income tax at the Brookings Institution in Washington in 1975. Arnold Lovell of the British Treasury, Vito Tanzi of the International Monetary Fund, and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University all suggested that rising income taxes may be inflationary because workers attempt to keep their after tax earnings constant. Gordon cited studies in the United States indicating that wages rise by one-fifth of any income-tax hike. Lovell referred to the English experience that the rise in wages is much greater with higher levels of inflation and inflationary consciousness among workers.6 Orthodox Brookings economist George Perry then stepped in to keep matters under control.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

Even as China’s fixed asset growth decreases, the gains from efficient mobility are evident for everyday workers, Alibaba shoppers, and millions of internal tourists and migrants taking advantage of affordable transportation all across the country. The lesson from America’s postwar period and China today is that infrastructure is not a one-off investment but a set of connective arteries to be constantly nurtured. Prominent American economists such as Robert Gordon of Northwestern and Tyler Cowen of George Mason argue that the U.S. economy is plagued by falling productivity gains, poor infrastructure, a technological innovation plateau, declining education standards, and rising inequality; its transportation system remains too slow and inefficient to meet its export targets.

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State
by Barton Gellman
Published 20 May 2020

I recounted this story at length in a 2014 speech marking the fortieth anniversary of the Student Press Law Center, which assisted us in our legal battle. The speech and accompanying slides are available in full on YouTube, https://youtu.be/bSMnfzGyn08. a First Amendment lawsuit: Gellman v. Wacker, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 1977. I brought the case with fellow students Craig Snyder and Robert Gordon. Many of the filings and hearing transcripts are available in the Barton Gellman Papers, box 10, Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. See http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC262/c011. poison note for my college application file: During my freshman year of college, I obtained a copy from the admissions office.

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan
Published 16 Jan 2018

“Relationship of Subjective and Objective Social Status with Psychological and Physiological Functioning: Preliminary Data in Healthy, White Women.” Health Psychology 19 (6): 586–92. Agan, Amanda. 2011. “Non-cognitive Skills and Crime.” IZA Conference Paper. http://www.iza.org/conference_files/CoNoCoSk2011/agan_a6558.pdf. Akerlof, George, William Dickens, George Perry, Robert Gordon, and N. Gregory Mankiw. 1996. “The Macroeconomics of Low Inflation.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1996 (1): 1–76. Akerlof, George, and Janet Yellen. 1990. “The Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis and Unemployment.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 105 (2): 255–83. Akyol, Ahmet, and Kartik Athreya. 2005.

The Rough Guide to Cape Town, Winelands & Garden Route
by Rough Guides , James Bembridge and Barbara McCrea
Published 4 Jan 2018

Prestwich Memorial St Andrew’s Sq, cnr Buitengracht St and Somerset Rd • Mon–Fri 8am–6pm, Sat & Sun 8am–1pm • Free • 021 487 2755 The Prestwich Memorial, housed in an elegant modern structure with a facade of Robben Island slate, accommodates 2500 sets of human bones, excavated in 2003, of forgotten and marginalized Capetonians. Many were slaves executed in the vicinity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The interesting interpretation boards provide accounts of burial practices, historic hospitals in the area and, across one wall, a reproduction of a beautiful panorama of Cape Town, painted by Robert Gordon in 1778. Outside, the Prestwich Memorial Garden exhibits sculptures by homegrown artists, including two mosaic-adorned Rock Girl benches (www.rockgirlsa.org), part of a city-wide scheme to create safe spaces for women and young people. The Walk of Remembrance, created for the 2010 World Cup and renamed from the Fan Walk after Mandela’s death, passes by en route between the train station and Cape Town Stadium.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

But the country’s birth also occurred simultaneously with an explosion of the materially new as well. You probably imagine, as I did, that the average European’s standard of living gradually improved as the Middle Ages ended in the 1400s. In fact, in the economies of America and Britain, measured by the average person’s share of total production, as the economist Robert Gordon says, “there was virtually no economic growth before 1750.” And that changed only because in the 1760s and ’70s practical large-scale steam engines were perfected, just as manufacturing was being otherwise mechanized. Suddenly life was transformed: the industrial revolution began at the same moment as our Revolution.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

Milton Friedman, Dollars and Deficits: Living with America’s Economic Problems (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 94. 70. James Tobin, “The Natural Rate as New Classical Macroeconomics,” 1993, Cowles Foundation Papers 1061. 71. A version of the speech was published the next year in the American Economic Review as Friedman, “The Role of Monetary Policy.” The economic historian Robert Gordon argues intriguingly that Friedman was influenced by the close ties between the University of Chicago economics department and Latin America, where it was obvious that inflation and unemployment did not have a predictable relationship. See Robert J. Gordon, “The History of the Phillips Curve: Consensus and Bifurcation,” Economica 78, no. 309 (2011): 10–50.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

Most economists envisage growth for economies at the frontier as periods of path-breaking innovation (when the key innovations of the technological revolution emerge) followed by steady development and implementation until most of the gains from that innovation have been reaped. Tyler Cowen of George Mason University and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argue that most of the possibilities of the Second Industrial Revolution had been exhausted by the end of the 1960s.22 For instance, the big innovation that made commercial air travel more attractive than travel by ocean liner was reasonably safe and fast jet planes with pressurized air cabins.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

Show Me the Money But if these transformations are real, why is it taking so long for them to show up in the productivity figures, as economists define them—the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output? Since productivity improvements drive growth, that is an important and now a hotly debated subject among economic writers. The economist Robert Gordon has made a compelling case in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War that the days of steadily rising growth are probably behind us. He believes all the big gains were made in the “special century” between 1870 and 1970—with the likes of automobiles, radio, television, indoor plumbing, electrification, vaccines, clean water, air travel, central heating, women’s empowerment, and air-conditioning and antibiotics.

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age
by W. Bernard Carlson
Published 11 May 2013

During this race, Morgan was the commodore of the New York Yacht Club and the chief sponsor of the defending yacht, Columbia. As we saw previously, Marconi came to New York in order to demonstrate his wireless system by transmitting messages from the races to reporters from the New York Herald. Just prior to the race, Edward C. Grenfell and Robert Gordon from Morgan’s London branch approached the directors of Marconi’s company, the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company, offering to buy Marconi’s American patents for 200,000 pounds.26 As part of the deal, the Morgan men insisted that it include “Ocean rights” that they could exercise “if ever Wireless telegraphy could communicate from England to New York.”

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

Before and after 2008, global energy consumption rose steadily. The world’s total investment (relative to GDP) remained in line with its historical average.17 Rifkin’s ‘economy of abundance’ remained a tantalizing speculation. Perhaps the problem wasn’t to do with excess savings or weak investment demand but with economic efficiency. Robert Gordon suggested as much in his 2012 paper ‘Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?’. The Northwestern economist lamented that the digital revolution ‘provided new opportunities for consumption on the job and in leisure hours rather than a continuation of the historical tradition of replacing human labor with machines’.18 Gordon’s concerns recall a famous comment made by MIT economist Bob Solow in 1987, that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’

Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
by Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm
Published 18 May 2022

The expansion of life insurance has been intimately linked to the growth of medical data, initially based on simple urine, body size, and blood pressure markers but now including the whole range of modern diagnostics, which are linked to mortality tables to predict life expectancy. The next chapter shows how the expansion of such data drove the growth of the life insurance business. The US healthcare market provides another, related, example of commercial competition for MASs. Initially, writes Robert Gordon, the market “suffered from all the abuses of modern health insurance, including ‘cream skimming’ to find the healthiest patients, age limitations to avoid insuring the old, medical exams to detect preexisting conditions, and reluctance to insure the lower classes” (Gordon 2016, 235). Trying to exclude bad risks using crude indicators limits the size of the market, but the introduction of group health plans gave private insurance much greater reach.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

I further benefited from feedback at presentations at the Evergreen State College, the Universities of Copenhagen and Lund, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. I am grateful to the organizers of these events: Ulrike Krotscheck, Peter Bang, Carl Hampus Lyttkens, Liu Jinyu, and Hu Yujuan. David Christian, Joy Connolly, Peter Garnsey, Robert Gordon, Philip Hoffman, Branko Milanovic, Joel Mokyr, Reviel Netz, Şevket Pamuk, David Stasavage, and Peter Turchin very kindly read and commented on the whole manuscript. Kyle Harper, William Harris, Geoffrey Kron, Peter Lindert, Josh Ober, and Thomas Piketty also read parts of the book. A group of historians at the Saxo Institute in Copenhagen met to discuss my manuscript, and I am particularly grateful to Gunner Lind and Jan Pedersen for their extensive input.

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
by Adam Higginbotham
Published 14 May 2024

But the strategy: “Troubled Space Shuttle Arrives at Space Center,” NYT, March 25, 1979; John Schwartz, “Loss of the Shuttle: Heat Shields; Protective Tiles Have Been Major Concern from the Start,” NYT, February 3, 2003; Heppenheimer, Development of the Shuttle, 234–35; Trento, Prescription for Disaster, 163. Showing his pass: Kuznetz, Save the Shuttle, loc. 663. He writes that 20,000 tiles were attached when he arrived: Kuznetz, Save the Shuttle, loc. 665. A few weeks later: NASA announced Kleinknecht’s appointment on June 4, 1979: Robert Gordon, “Kleinknecht Assumes New Role,” JSC NASA News Release 79-39. torn away: Kenny Kleinknecht, OHI-J, by Carol Butler, September 10, 1998, 12.2, 12.25. named Pipeline: Kuznetz, Save the Shuttle, loc. 564. forced to admit: AP, “NASA Revising Budget for 1980; Proposes $220 Million Additional,” NYT, May 20, 1979.

Winds of Change
by Peter Hennessy
Published 27 Aug 2019

Yet those first postwar decades do – and did – have a touch of gold around them, even though UK growth rates lagged behind those of West Germany and France. French economists called them ‘the thirty glorious years’ (ending with the oil shocks in the early to mid 1970s). More recent American economic historians have characterized the first two-and-a-half decades as ‘the Great Leap Forward’:11 the Princeton economist Robert Gordon argues that the great technical breakthroughs of the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century did not reach their maximum effect in terms of ‘total factor productivity’ until the years after 1945, boosted by wartime innovation and stimulated still further by the rise of a mass-consumption society whose ingredients were electricity, cars, telephones, running water and sewerage, improved infrastructure generally plus the spread of mass higher education.12 Gordon was writing about the United States (where, of course, overall consumption and living standards were much higher), but his analysis fits early postwar Britain apart from mass higher education, which the UK reached only in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

Workers, Global Capitalism Fails to Deliver,” New York Times, April 14, 2011, accessed August 18, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/us/15iht-letter15.html. Labor’s share of national income: See, e.g., Robert J. Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker, “Controversies About the Rise of American Inequality: A Survey,” NBER Working Paper No. 13982 (April 21, 2008), http://economics.weinberg.northwestern.edu/robert-gordon/files/RescPapers/ControversiesRiseAmericanInequality.pdf; Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert, “Measuring Labor’s Share of Income,” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Policy Discussion Paper No. 7 (November 2004), accessed August 23, 2018, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?ab stract_id=1024847; Brian I.

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
by Gary Taubes
Published 25 Sep 2007

Still, because the brain and central nervous system typically burn 120 to 130 grams of glucose a day, nutritionists insisted (as many still do) that carbohydrates must be our primary fuel, and they remained skeptical of the notion that fat plays any role in energy balance other than as a long-term reserve for emergencies. Among physiologists and biochemists, any such skepticism began to evaporate after Wertheimer’s review of fat metabolism appeared in 1948. It vanished after the 1956 publication of papers by Vincent Dole at Rockefeller University, Robert Gordon at NIH, and Sigfrid Laurell of the University of Lund in Sweden that reported the development of a technique for measuring the concentration of fatty acids in the circulation. All three articles suggested that these fatty acids were the form in which fat is burned for fuel in the body. The concentration of fatty acids in the circulation, they reported, is surprisingly low immediately after a meal, when blood-sugar levels are highest, but then increases steadily in the hours that follow, as the blood sugar ebbs.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

According to “the new secular stagnation hypothesis” analyzed by Lawrence Summers, even those paltry rates can be maintained (in conjunction with low unemployment) only if central banks set interest rates at zero or negative values, which could lead to financial instability and other problems.9 In a period of rising income inequality, secular stagnation could leave a majority of people with static or falling incomes for the foreseeable future. If economies stop growing, things could get ugly. No one really knows why productivity growth slacked off in the early 1970s or how to bring it back up.10 Some economists, like Robert Gordon in his 2016 The Rise and Fall of American Growth, point to demographic and macroeconomic headwinds, such as fewer working people supporting more retirees, a leveling off in the expansion of education, a rise in government debt, and the increase in inequality (which depresses demand for goods and services, because richer people spend less of their incomes than poorer people).11 Gordon adds that the most transformative inventions may already have been invented.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
Published 2 Nov 2009

Other Yale colleagues and friends who have offered advice and encouragement over the years include Jean-Christophe Agnew, Diana Balmori, Troy Brennan, Elise Broach, George Chauncey, David Brion Davis, Kai Erikson, Ann Fabian, Jean Fraser, Tom Gariepy, Peter Gay, Steve Gillon, Lori Ginzberg, Jay Gitlin, John Godfrey, Michael Goldberg, Robert Gordon, Amy Green, Reeve Huston, Paul Johnson, Susan Johnson, Hugh Joswick, Jonathan Lear, Edie MacMullen, Ramsay MacMullen, George Miles, Katherine Morrissey, Kathy Morse, Jan Oscherwitz, William Parker, Jenny Price, Karen Sawislak, Gaddis Smith, Tom Smith, Jonathan Spence, Sylvia Tesh, Eustace Theodore, Florence Thomas, Conrad Totman, Alan Trachtenberg, John Wargo, Tim Weiskel, and Steven Wilf.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Published 18 Dec 2007

A year later, he had an eleven-inch machine that produced million-volt protons. Lawrence now dreamed of building ever bigger accelerators, machines weighing many hundreds of tons and costing tens of thousands of dollars. He coined a new name for his invention, the “cyclotron,” and persuaded the president of the University of California, Robert Gordon Sproul, to give him an old wooden building adjacent to LeConte Hall, the physics building that sat high on the upper end of Berkeley’s beautiful campus. Lawrence named it the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. Theoretical physicists around the world soon realized that what Lawrence had created in his “Rad Lab” would allow them to explore the innermost reaches of the atom.