A provocative recent NBER Working Paper by Robert Gordon concludes that US economic growth will slow considerably over the next century to the extent that the lives of our grandchildren will not be very different from ours. The reason for this, according to Gordon, is that many of the inventions over the last 150 years have been "one-time-only inventions, which "limits the potential for a continuing stream of equally basic inventions". Says Gordon: "Such essential improvements of human life as the conversion from rural to urban life, the speed of travel, the temperature of rooms, and the near-elimination of brute-force manual labour, have already been achieved." While these innovations have considerably improved our productivity, he argues that more recent innovation, like Google and Twitter and the iPad, has focused less on labour-saving technology and more on "a succession of entertainment and communication devices that do the same things as we could before, but now in smaller and more convenient packages."
The lives of our grandchildren
The lives of our grandchildren
The lives of our grandchildren
A provocative recent NBER Working Paper by Robert Gordon concludes that US economic growth will slow considerably over the next century to the extent that the lives of our grandchildren will not be very different from ours. The reason for this, according to Gordon, is that many of the inventions over the last 150 years have been "one-time-only inventions, which "limits the potential for a continuing stream of equally basic inventions". Says Gordon: "Such essential improvements of human life as the conversion from rural to urban life, the speed of travel, the temperature of rooms, and the near-elimination of brute-force manual labour, have already been achieved." While these innovations have considerably improved our productivity, he argues that more recent innovation, like Google and Twitter and the iPad, has focused less on labour-saving technology and more on "a succession of entertainment and communication devices that do the same things as we could before, but now in smaller and more convenient packages."