The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen
The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen
List: $9.99 | Sale: $7.00
Club: $4.99

The Great Stagnation
How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better

Author: Tyler Cowen

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Unabridged: 2 hr 13 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/30/2011

Synopsis

America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, median 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 than 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.

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.

About Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He blogs at Marginalrevolution.com, the world's leading economics blog. He also writes regularly for the New York Times, and he has written for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wilson Quarterly.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Peter on November 05, 2018

Tyler Cowen wrote what looks like a couple of blog posts, and published them in book form. The problem: US economic growth slowed in the early 1970s, and hasn't recovered much. Median family income would be 50% higher if the growth of 1945-1970 had continued. I criticized this book when I reviewed the......more

Goodreads review by Amber on June 12, 2011

This is a wonderful mini-book reflecting on the slowing pace of technological process, how US economic growth has changed as a result, and what that means for the next 30 years. Cowen's thesis--that much of the growth from 1940-'75 came from "low-hanging fruit" and will not easily be duplicated--mak......more

Goodreads review by Thiago on March 12, 2021

Sloppy. It doesn't consider a myriad of possible causes for The Great Stagnation. Like Mancur Olson's argument that democratic stability multiplies rent-seekers, which means more entry barriers. You can't just go around inoculating random kids with cowpox blisters anymore, like Edward Jenner did in......more

Goodreads review by Jeremiah on March 17, 2012

Cowen takes a stab at the problem of America losing its economic mojo since the 1970's. His theory: the unparalleled prosperity of the US from the 1800's through 1950 was the result of easy pickins in the areas of: 1. free (stolen) land 2. productivity increases resulting from public education 3. techn......more

Goodreads review by Stefani on March 19, 2025

An extremely quick read that made good points about more possible reasons we are having slow economic growth. I thought it was especially interesting how he pointed out that it was technology that enabled big business AND big government to grow... side-by-side. And a note to all those Keynsian econom......more

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List