Reddit reviews The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton

I just read the article and I want to go back to bed: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/

Peak liberal ideology right here, folks

Edit: I just looked up the co-authors and found that one of them, Tyler Cowan, is the author of a book titled The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.

Cowan's fundamental argument is that America's astronomical wealth rests on certain forms of """low-hanging fruit"""" such as """free land""" (which, he generously notes, "was often stolen from Native Americans, one should not forget) and that the benefits of that """low-hanging fruit""" have now ceased helping deliver the same rate of exploitation as it used to.

Simply put, his argument vindicates Marx's argument about the falling rate of profit, and this article with his co-author Patrick Collison is really about how to grasp this pseudo-object called "progress" in order to return us to past rates of profitability.

In conclusion: these fuckin liberals will drive a comrade to drink

Edit 2: This has to be one of the saddest sentences I've ever read lol:

>Along the cultural dimension, the artists of Renaissance Florence enriched the heritage of all humankind, and in the process created the masterworks that are still the lifeblood of the local economy.

>Many arguments from people like Noam Chomsky against capitalism is that real wages (ie inflation adjusted wages) have gone down in the US in the last 50 years. Is this actually true? Is it only true for certain sectors of the economy? Does anyone have any good links?

It is certainly true that real wages/compensation "peaked" or "plateaued" around the early-to-mid 1970's (the previous century plus they had pretty much risen at a regular and somewhat phenomenal rate).

The reasons for the plateau are arguable. It is almost certain that the US defaulting on the gold-exchange standard (unilaterally "breaking" the Bretton Woods agreement) in late 1971 was a big part of it. (And even "stickiness" played a part -- employers were VERY reticent to give across the board 10% wage increases, even when inflation was running HIGHER than that during the previous year. Government propaganda falsely attributing "inflation" to greed and high wage demands {and thus denying it's own role on the monetary devaluation side} certainly fed into that reticence.)

Elizabeth Warren makes a pretty solid case that the en masse addition of WOMEN into the workforce also had a dramatic effect (and a definite backward one in terms that previously women had worked on farms as hard as men -- but a chief difference is that as salaried/wage earning workers, their incomes were now fully taxed).

But I think Tyler Cowen makes a pretty good case in his recent "Great Stagnation" that another reason for the plateauing (and perhaps one underlying the monetary problem) was the fact that we we running out of low-hanging fruit on which to build that increasing wage (and you could add in that while innovation/productivity HAVE continued in basic things like food production, the law of diminishing returns applies).

And of course, people like Chomsky are in total denial about the role of "socialist" spending (welfare state) in all of that -- seeking to lay all of the blame on the "warfare state" side (even though economically speaking, both are non-productive governmental consumption factors).

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-eSpecial-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS

You can find pirate PDF copies with a bit of google-fu.

The comparison to the gilded age is totally laughable, we're in such a period of stagnation, with people fleeing any type of risk (and the associated growth) by any means necessary.

The gilded age, and it's "problems" were all pretty much a consequence of breakneck, unbridled, explosive growth.

They were at a rolling boil, we're not even at a simmer.

First off, Okun's law is partly observational (though it can be derived through IS-LM), and because of that it is really only tested for "normal" situations, and there are no completely fixed economies in the real world, even Japan has a certain level of churn even when the aggregates hover around zero. Like most economic theories, the predictions are strongest at the margin.

To address the main question, to a certain extent the answer is implied in the question. When dealing with mathematical (textbook) macro, we simply assume that GDP is equivalent to welfare, because on a micro level it is impossible to aggregate utility. From a theoretical standpoint, assuming GDP growth equal to zero is equivalent to assuming welfare change equal to zero.

Now, from a societal standpoint this becomes more complicated. As mentioned, even when the macroeconomic aggregates are relatively steady the underlying real economy can experience tremendous fluctuations. For example, US inflation over the last few years has been overall rather moderate, even though food prices have risen and technology costs have fallen. Similarly, if Consumption falls by a trillion dollars and Gov't Spending rises by a trillion dollars, it is possible (though not necessary) that this could represent a fairly large decrease in consumer welfare even though the aggregate figure is static.

Further, there are socio-economic reasons to assume that stagnant GDP would hurt welfare. Tyler Cowen theorizes that US economic growth is due for a drastic slowdown in the near to mid term, and that because so many contracts and expectations are based on the idea of continuous economic growth this will cause a great deal of disruption. If we wish away these fairly high transition costs, a society that was organized and expecting zero growth would be so very different from what economic science typically studies that it is hard to say what would happen, though leaning heavily on IS-LM equations seems like a reasonable first estimation of what would occur.

You might be interested in read The great Stagnation.

Vindicates it to a certain level yes. http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-Eventually-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS is a great book mostly talking about America's economic decline but also speaks a little to China as well. China has seen impressive growth by the numbers and in some real world cases but that doesn't mean the system is incredibly corrupt and inefficient. A state managed system can work wonders when all you have to do is do the simple things all the other developed countries have done already (build infrastructure, factories with cheap labor, open up borders). This is especially true seeing what China was coming from in the 1970s, there wasn't much room to go but up. Now in the coming decades we will see how well this development approach will work into the future.

>As income disparity rises, the majority of people must work harder to maintain their standard of living.

That is not obviously true. It would be if we lived in a world with a pie of fixed-size. If the pie were fixed, then a bigger slice for me necessarily means a smaller piece for someone else. But that's not the world we live in. The pie is growing, so there is at least the mathematical possibility that, although the distribution is changing, the size of everyone's piece is growing. So in order to show that's the case, you would need to show conclusively that the super rich are getting so much of the growing pie that the middle class and poor are actually losing out. There is very little data to support this. The best that some people have been able to do on that front is claim that wages have stagnated since the 70s. But even this isn't clear. First of all, it's hard to measure, because today if you're poor you have a colour TV and a computer and an iPhone and in the 70s you did not. Does this make you richer? It must, in some sense at least. So the whole thing about income disparity is actually a lot less clear-cut than people think. I'm not saying it's not an issue. I'm saying that I haven't been convinced that it's an issue. I don't mind if a millionaire becomes a billionaire and my income stays constant. I'm perfectly content with that, and not because I am convinced that I will become a millionaire, but because I live comfortably enough to be happy. I'm not rich. I just don't need much more than what I have.

So, summing up, it'll take more than blind assertions that income disparity will destroy civilization for me to believe it. I'm open to being convinced but you can't just assert it. And I am definitely sure that the art gallery stairs are not the place for debate on this. It's not an open-and-closed issue, and people behave as though it is. "Occupying" should be reserved for times when something needs to be done immediately but if we're not even sure if there is a problem, or what that problem is, I think protesting is entirely misplaced.

Economists don't agree about much, but there is almost universal agreement that free trade deals like GATT and NAFTA are good for society. They make most of society much, much better off than they would be absent free trade. That goes for people as well as corporations.

The problem is that there will always be some people who lose out and find that their skills are no longer necessary. I don't remember anyone ever saying that wouldn't happen, at least to some extent. I think what's been unexpected is the extent to which we haven't been able to find productive things for those displaced workers to do. Tyler Cowen calls it "The Great Stagnation." And again, I think that problem is largely due to broader changes in the nature of our economy. If globalization had occurred fifty years ago, the displaced workers would just have shifted over and applied the same skills to make different products. But because manufacturing in the U.S. has become so specialized, there's just not much need for low-skill people. I don't see how "corporate interests" are responsible for that trend, except to the extent that they've decided -- rightly, I would argue -- to adopt efficiency-enhancing technologies.

Oh I've seen this argument before in pop culture form. Personally, I don't think it passes the sniff test for a couple reasons but I'll read these resources and check it out!

I highly recommend The Great Stagnation to you. It sheds some optimistic light on the role of the internet while simultaneously stressing that we need gear up America again for the new century.

Come now, I'm trying to engage you. Like this entire time.

ALL I SAID WAS HAVE SKILLS THAT CAN MAKE YOU STABLE AND HELP YOU HAVE A DAYJOB SO YOU CAN WORK ON YOUR DREAMS IN STABILITY.

Like I said that four times or something like that.

Over and over again.

Have skills people will pay for. Make sure you don't hate those skills but you don't have to have a passion for it. Work on your fun thing. It's unlikely to be the next Beatles because there's not enough brain space, but if it makes you happy, hobbies are great!

Somehow that came out

>NOBODY SHOULD EVER BE HAPPY. ALL ARE SLAVES!

Or something. I'm not sure how I could be more clear.

Anyone I know I haven't cited much here's an info dumb

http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-Stagnation-Low-Hanging-ebook/dp/B004H0M8QS Tyler Cowen is one of the World's best most sober economists. You should fall in love with him (even if he sounds autistic)

http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI

Machines might be becoming substitutes instead of completments. This could cause problems even if we were socialists. We have no idea how to handle that

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4su/how_to_be_happy/ All the best happiness research in one post

http://www.amazon.com/Worthless-ebook/dp/B006N0THIM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194677&sr=1-1 A good book about the economics of college degrees

http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-ebook/dp/B003E749TE/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194701&sr=1-1-spell

Jonathan Haidt is sexy and cool and also a psychologist.

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html How to do what you love only also be practical and not ruin your life.

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html How to get fuck you money if you can identify a good start up and work that hard. (also finance

http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-ebook/dp/B00139XTG4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194849&sr=1-1 Why all the advantages of artists go to a few while most are forgotten because they have trouble finding a fanbase

http://www.amazon.com/The-Consolations-Philosophy-Alain-Botton/dp/0679779175/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194919&sr=1-3 How Ethical Philosophy can help with not having your favorite external circumstances.

Why modern therapy owes much of it's usefully to ideas generated by old greeks

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Cognitive-Behavioural-Therapy-Psychotherapy-ebook/dp/B005TQU5KA/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334194962&sr=1-1

So yea, I hope that made up for claims you find spurious.