{"id":3806,"date":"2011-03-07T09:22:52","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T14:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=3806"},"modified":"2011-03-07T12:10:06","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T17:10:06","slug":"stagnation-google-and-the-in-box-say-otherwise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/03\/07\/stagnation-google-and-the-in-box-say-otherwise\/","title":{"rendered":"Stagnation? Google and the In Box say otherwise"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning, NPR interviewed Tyler Cowen<\/a>, author of the provocative new book The Great Stagnation.\u00a0\u00a0 (Read an excerpt here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Cowen argues that by the 1970s, Americans had gobbled up all the nation’s “easy” prosperity.\u00a0 We’ve benefited from low-cost gains in education, natural resources extraction, energy and so on.<\/p>\n

He thinks that era is over, that future gains will be harder to come by and less rapid; and he’s convinced that the current economic recession is evidence of that fact<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I think Cowen is wrong for a couple of big reasons, most of which center around the incredibly rapid development of medical and information technologies.<\/p>\n

I’ll focus mostly on the latter.<\/p>\n

In 1965 — just as the stagnation Cowen describes was supposedly settling in — the American Gordon Moore stumbled across a concept and an axiom that has come to define modern life.<\/p>\n

Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel, noted that the basic computing power that could be engineered into an integrated circuit was doubling roughly every two years.<\/p>\n

That astonishing logarithmic trend has continued throughout the post-War era, and it has revolutionized every aspect of our existences, from the doo-hickies that heal us, to the Twitter feeds that trigger and shape revolutions.<\/p>\n

More than almost any other grand societal trend, the exponential growth in computing power an innovation has reinvented, well, us.<\/p>\n

It gave rise to the new global economy, which cracked open markets, cultures, and political systems.<\/p>\n

I’m able to work — and earn my livelihood — from my dining room table right now, thanks largely to Moore’s Law.<\/p>\n

Yes, these trends have brought some serious challenges to American society.\u00a0 But they’ve also introduced unheard-of levels of efficiency, progress, convenience, and prosperity.<\/p>\n

In the period from 1980 through 2007, GDP in the US grew from roughly $22,600 to $37,700 per person.\u00a0 That kind of 50% gain is certainly not stagnation.<\/p>\n

(A thornier question, in my opinion, is the way our gains in prosperity are distributed.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

In the interview with NPR, Cowen acknowledged that the rise of the internet was a major breakthrough, but he argued that the on-line revolution hadn’t significantly benefited our economy.<\/p>\n

But Google and Facebook are only small components of the IT world we now inhabit.<\/p>\n

Without the data management systems that we now take for granted, modern agriculture (which has pushed down food prices) and modern retail (which has generated a buying-power surge for lower income Americans) would have been impossible.<\/p>\n

It would also be nearly impossible to manage real-time trade with China and India.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a component of our economic lives that hasn’t been reshaped by technological advancements developed (in large measure) during the era Cowen defines as stagnant.<\/p>\n

When I was born (in 1965) information was incredibly constricted, monopolized, difficult and expensive to access and process.\u00a0 Now it is ubiquitous, cheap and moves literally at the speed of light.<\/p>\n

It’s also worth noting that in the half-century his book describes — the period after we had supposedly gobbled up our low-hanging fruit — we Americans expanded our average life expectancies by seven years.<\/p>\n

That’s a fairly stunning 10% increase, one that has revolutionized in tangible ways our working lives, and our expectations for retirement.<\/p>\n

During the period Cowen describes, we also raised education standards and opened new opportunities for tens of millions of women and minorities.<\/p>\n

We’ve unleashed the creative and wealth generating potential of roughly half the population, to the degree that women now outnumber men in many of our universities.<\/p>\n

Returns on these new investments and social innovations are sure to continue bearing economic fruit as we move forward.<\/p>\n

None of which is to suggest that we don’t have a lot of questions that need answering.<\/p>\n

Our trade policies, our approach to education, our ideas about how America’s remarkable prosperity should be distributed — those are all worthy of debate.<\/p>\n

But assuming that we’re adrift in a period of stagnation is the wrong place to start that conversation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning, NPR interviewed Tyler Cowen, author of the provocative new book The Great Stagnation.\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3873,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3806\/revisions\/3873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}