The Great Stagnation

If you have time to read only 70 odd-pages today and yet you want to understand what lies at the root of the seemingly endless (and often frustrating) debate of re-distributionists vs fiscal conservatives in United States, you must read this lucid book written in the kind of accessible language that Tyler Cowen prefers on his marvelous blog ‘Marginal Revolution' (which I must admit I have followed for years). Tyler, one the sharpest heterodox thinkers of our times postulates that the United States has entered a period of ‘Great Stagnation' since the 1970s, wherein despite superficial and marginal improvements in living standards, wide-ranging availability of free/cheap online pleasure and accessibility to information on the internet- technological progress has largely plateaued because the national economy has already picked the ‘low hanging fruits' to their fullest, and as a consequence median incomes remain stagnant. He further clarifies that the fiscal-stimulus driven minimal growth that has accompanied the post-financial crisis recovery has also largely been ‘jobless' and the country is looking toward a future where the most dynamic sectors of its economy are employing historically minuscule numbers of people (i.e digital companies) while at the same time the sectors of the US economy where government spending is increasing the most are displaying worse-than expected levels of productivity/ return on investment. If any of you follow Eric Weinstein's Portal you would know that what Tyler is essentially articulating in this book is what Weinstein calls the EGO (Embedded Growth Obligations) of institutions that were designed and premised to function in a world where growth is endless, and so is technological progress. Every line of this book is a cold hard wake-up call for an obsolete gamut of politics that surrounds the kind of wishful thinking surrounding ‘economic growth'.