ARE THE PAST 250 YEARS OF RAPID ECONOMIC GROWTH ONLY AN INTERLUDE?

ARE THE PAST 250 YEARS OF RAPID ECONOMIC GROWTH ONLY AN INTERLUDE? Professor Gordon is an authority on economic productivity, which can be thought of as the output that we can achieve or have achieved from defined inputs. He raises the question in the summary: “There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history.” Underlying his question is the premise that economic growth has been achieved because of technological change, and there is no way of knowing whether technological change will continue. Professor Gordon’s judgment is that economic growth (in terms of what the economy can produce) has in fact been slowing down for the past 50 years. In this related article, Professor Gordon says: “Growth in the frontier economy gradually accelerated after 1750, reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century, and has been slowing since.”

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1 Response to ARE THE PAST 250 YEARS OF RAPID ECONOMIC GROWTH ONLY AN INTERLUDE?

  1. Elmer says:

    The classifications seem contestable. Railroads were invented toward the of the first period but not much developed; toilets surely were invented before 1870, so for the second period only the development occurred. Airplanes are somehow attributed to the period before they were invented. The cluster of innovations for, say, the second period includes unrelated innovations, so the clustering may result from coincidence rather than a wave of invention. The great progress in medicine from about 1940 doesn’t count, maybe because it affects welfare rather than GNP, but agricultural progress, though maybe not industrial, must surely have had a big on GNP
    . Is there a theory of when invention occurs present here or is this like the predictions around 1900 that no more discoveries could be made in physics?

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