The Rise and Decline of Nations

The Rise and Decline of Nations
Author: Mancur Olson
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0300157673

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A leading political economist advances a new theory to explain the postwar shifts in the relative economic fortunes and positions of various nations and regions.

The Great Stagnation

The Great Stagnation
Author: Tyler Cowen
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2011-01-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1101502258

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Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Fully Grown

Fully Grown
Author: Dietrich Vollrath
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022-06-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226820041

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Vollrath challenges our long-held assumption that growth is the best indicator of an economy’s health. Most economists would agree that a thriving economy is synonymous with GDP growth. The more we produce and consume, the higher our living standard and the more resources available to the public. This means that our current era, in which growth has slowed substantially from its postwar highs, has raised alarm bells. But should it? Is growth actually the best way to measure economic success—and does our slowdown indicate economic problems? The counterintuitive answer Dietrich Vollrath offers is: No. Looking at the same facts as other economists, he offers a radically different interpretation. Rather than a sign of economic failure, he argues, our current slowdown is, in fact, a sign of our widespread economic success. Our powerful economy has already supplied so much of the necessary stuff of modern life, brought us so much comfort, security, and luxury, that we have turned to new forms of production and consumption that increase our well-being but do not contribute to growth in GDP. In Fully Grown, Vollrath offers a powerful case to support that argument. He explores a number of important trends in the US economy: including a decrease in the number of workers relative to the population, a shift from a goods-driven economy to a services-driven one, and a decline in geographic mobility. In each case, he shows how their economic effects could be read as a sign of success, even though they each act as a brake of GDP growth. He also reveals what growth measurement can and cannot tell us—which factors are rightly correlated with economic success, which tell us nothing about significant changes in the economy, and which fall into a conspicuously gray area. Sure to be controversial, Fully Grown will reset the terms of economic debate and help us think anew about what a successful economy looks like.

Fully Grown

Fully Grown
Author: Dietrich Vollrath
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-01-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022666600X

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Most economists would agree that a thriving economy is synonymous with GDP growth. The more we produce and consume, the higher our living standard and the more resources available to the public. This means that our current era, in which growth has slowed substantially from its postwar highs, has raised alarm bells. But should it? Is growth actually the best way to measure economic success—and does our slowdown indicate economic problems? The counterintuitive answer Dietrich Vollrath offers is: No. Looking at the same facts as other economists, he offers a radically different interpretation. Rather than a sign of economic failure, he argues, our current slowdown is, in fact, a sign of our widespread economic success. Our powerful economy has already supplied so much of the necessary stuff of modern life, brought us so much comfort, security, and luxury, that we have turned to new forms of production and consumption that increase our well-being but do not contribute to growth in GDP. In Fully Grown, Vollrath offers a powerful case to support that argument. He explores a number of important trends in the US economy: including a decrease in the number of workers relative to the population, a shift from a goods-driven economy to a services-driven one, and a decline in geographic mobility. In each case, he shows how their economic effects could be read as a sign of success, even though they each act as a brake of GDP growth. He also reveals what growth measurement can and cannot tell us—which factors are rightly correlated with economic success, which tell us nothing about significant changes in the economy, and which fall into a conspicuously gray area. Sure to be controversial, Fully Grown will reset the terms of economic debate and help us think anew about what a successful economy looks like.

The Age of Stagnation

The Age of Stagnation
Author: Satyajit Das
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2016-02-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1633881598

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The global economy is entering an era of protracted stagnation, similar to what Japan has experienced for over a decade. That is the message of this brilliant and controversial summary of our current economic predicament from an internationally respected consultant and commentator on financial markets, who predicted the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The author challenges the assumption that growth can be perpetual and questions the ability of political leaders to enact the tough structural changes needed. He is particularly critical of the "easy money" approach to dealing with the great recession of 2008, citing the dangers of excessive debt and deep-seated fundamental imbalances. The fallout of these poor policies, he argues, will affect not only the business sector, but also the lifestyles and prosperity of average citizens and future generations. The author concludes with a thought experiment illustrating the large-scale changes that will be necessary to restore economic, financial, and social sustainability. This experiment has already been tried in Iceland, which went bankrupt in the wake of the 2008 crisis, and now, after a painful adjustment, is on the road to recovery. Written for the lay reader and peppered with witty anecdotes, this immensely readable book clearly explains the missteps that created the current dilemma, why a recovery has proved elusive, and the difficult remedies that must eventually be applied to ensure a stable future.

Diminishing Returns

Diminishing Returns
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2022-07-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0197607888

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A set of state of the art empirical analyses at the country, regional, and global level that work from a new theoretical framework that analyzes the politics of growth and stagnation. As highlighted by the recent debate on 'secular stagnation,' economic growth has slowed down considerably, and this has given rise to a host of new problems, from financial instability to the collapse of mainstream parties. What happens when growththe main mechanism of capitalist legitimationis harder to come by and less broadly shared? And how should we think about capitalist diversity in the context of global stagnation? In Diminishing Returns, Lucio Baccaro, Mark Blyth, and Jonas Pontusson address these questions by bringing together a number of comparative and international political economists with expertise across many different countries and regions. Going beyond the methodological nationalism common in most comparative research, each author departs from a common theoretical framework, the Growth Model Perspective, and contributes to develop it further. The outcome is a new theoretical framework to help social scientists, policymakers, and opinion makers, understand the politics of growth and stagnation, which offers state of the art empirical analyses at the country, regional, and global level.

Understanding American Economic Decline

Understanding American Economic Decline
Author: Michael Alan Bernstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 1994-07-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521456791

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Essays by leading scholars present a novel and systematic analysis of the economic difficulties confronting the United States.

Secular Stagnation on the Supply Side

Secular Stagnation on the Supply Side
Author: Robert J. Gordon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 27
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

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Secular stagnation refers not to the literal stagnation, i.e., stopping of economic growth but rather to the slowing of U.S. potential real GDP growth to half or less of its historical pace. The retardation of potential real GDP growth matters both because of its direct impact on the standard of living and also because of its indirect effect on net investment, which in turn feeds back to slower productivity growth. During the decade ending in 2014:Q4, U.S. real GDP grew at only 1.55% per year, almost exactly half the growth rate of 3.12% per year achieved during the previous three decades, 1974-2004, and an even smaller fraction of the 3.62% per year performance of 1929-1974. This paper predicts that slow growth of around 1.5% per year will continue over the next decade or two. Part of the slowdown in output growth is due to a decline in the growth rate of the working age population. A second reason is a shift in worker hours per capita from an increase due to the entry of women into the labor force during 1965-1995 to a future decrease due primarily to the retirement of the baby-boom generation. A third reason is an ongoing slowdown in the growth rate of output per hour, from 1.72% per year during 1974-2004 to 1.10% per year in 2004-2014 and to an even slower 0.55% per year during 2009-2014. The sources of the decline in productivity growth combine diminishing returns that have set in following the ICT revolution of the 1996-2004 "dot.com" era with a decline in business dynamism, as the entry of new business firms has steadily declined over the past three decades relative to the exit of existing firms. Moore's Law describing the steady exponential increase in the number of transistors on a chip became obsolete a decade ago. The historic rise of educational attainment has slowed to a crawl, and the declining share of children growing up in two-parent families may lead to a future decrease in high school completion and an increase in criminal activity among youth. While future productivity growth will be slower than before 2004, it will still continue as in the past decade at a rate slightly in excess of one% per year.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

The Rise and Fall of American Growth
Author: Robert J. Gordon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 785
Release: 2017-08-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1400888956

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How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.