Download or read book Fully Grown written by Dietrich Vollrath and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-06-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Great Stagnation written by Tyler Cowen and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-01-25 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of American Growth written by Robert J. Gordon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Declining Population Growth and Economic Stagnation Theory written by Ching-Sheng Shen and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Rise and Decline of Nations written by Mancur Olson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A compelling theory on the rationale for the changing fortunes of nations"--Publisher's website.
Download or read book The Rise and Decline of Nations written by Mancur Olson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Foreign Exchange Value of the Dollar written by and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Secular Stagnation on the Supply Side written by Robert J. Gordon and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Age of Stagnation written by Satyajit Das and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Diminishing Returns written by Mark Blyth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Global Financial Crisis and the following period of 'secular stagnation' have raised questions about the state of modern economics and macroeconomics in particular. This has had repercussions for social sciences that deal with economic issues. In particular in the fields of International Political Economy (IPE) and Comparative Political Economy (CPE) there is rising interest in non-mainstream macroeconomic theories (Blyth and Matthijs 2017, Baccaro and Pontussen 2016). In CPE there is a recognition that the field has in the past decades increasingly shifted to institutional and microeconomic questions and disregarded Keynesian considerations of macroeconomic instability and problems of fallacies of composition (Schwartz and Tranoy 2019). The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of post-Keynesian economics (PKE) as a non-mainstream macroeconomic theory"--
Download or read book The Anatomy of Stagnation in a Modern Economy written by Robert E. Hall and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2008, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression launched a deep contraction of the US economy. Output fell quickly to a level 10% below trend. Unemployment reached 10% of the labour force. Seven years after the crisis, unemployment was back to normal, but output was 15% below trend. Stagnation had set in. The most important source of the stagnation was a sharp decline in productivity growth. A decline in R&D and other productivity-enhancing investment was at least partially responsible. That decline began before the crisis, but the financial events of 2008 worsened the cutback. A second major source of stagnated output and income was capital depletion. Investment in business equipment fell in half immediately after the crisis. Cumulatively, the effect of below-trend investment accounted for 5 of the 15 percentage points of the shortfall in output. The third major development accounting for stagnation in output was a decline in the labour force that remained after unemployment had returned to normal. This development accounted for more than 3 percentage points of the shortfall in output. As a general matter, the direct decline in labour input and in output associated with the rise in unemployment was not important by 2015, but the follow-on stagnation operating through the effects on the two types of capital formation was substantial.
Download or read book The Age of Diminished Expectations written by Paul R. Krugman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition looks at how risky behaviour can lead to disaster in private markets, with colourful examples from Lloyd's of London and Sumitomo Metals. Krugman also considers the collapse of the Mexican peso, and the burst of Japan's 'bubble' economy.
Download or read book After the Great Recession written by Barry Z. Cynamon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays about the US Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 and the subsequent stagnation from prominent scholars.
Download or read book Understanding American Economic Decline written by Michael Alan Bernstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-07-29 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by leading scholars present a novel and systematic analysis of the economic difficulties confronting the United States.
Download or read book The Endless Crisis written by John Bellamy Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The days of boom and bubble are over, and the time has come to understand the long-term economic reality. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, hopes for a new phase of rapid economic expansion were quickly dashed. Instead, growth has been slow, unemployment has remained high, wages and benefits have seen little improvement, poverty has increased, and the trend toward more inequality of incomes and wealth has continued. It appears that the Great Recession has given way to a period of long-term anemic growth, which Foster and McChesney aptly term the Great Stagnation. This incisive and timely book traces the origins of economic stagnation and explains what it means for a clear understanding of our current situation. The authors point out that increasing monopolization of the economy—when a handful of large firms dominate one or several industries—leads to an over-abundance of capital and too few profitable investment opportunities, with economic stagnation as the result. Absent powerful stimuli to investment, such as historic innovations like the automobile or major government spending, modern capitalist economies have become increasingly dependent on the financial sector to realize profits. And while financialization may have provided a temporary respite from stagnation, it is a solution that cannot last indefinitely, as instability in financial markets over the last half-decade has made clear.
Download or read book The World Economy written by Dale W. Jorgenson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-24 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first long-term analysis of the process of structural change and productivity growth in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the USA.
Download or read book Unified Growth Theory written by Oded Galor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-11 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of the vast span of human history, economic growth was all but nonexistent. Then, about two centuries ago, some nations began to emerge from this epoch of economic stagnation, experiencing sustained economic growth that led to significant increases in standards of living and profoundly altered the level and distribution of wealth, population, education, and health across the globe. The question ever since has been--why? This is the first book to put forward a unified theory of economic growth that accounts for the entire growth process, from the dawn of civilization to today. Oded Galor, who founded the field of unified growth theory, identifies the historical and prehistorical forces behind the differential transition timing from stagnation to growth and the emergence of income disparity around the world. Galor shows how the interaction between technological progress and population ultimately raised the importance of education in coping with the rapidly changing technological environment, brought about significant reduction in fertility rates, and enabled some economies to devote greater resources toward a steady increase in per capita income, paving the way for sustained economic growth. Presents a unified theory of economic growth from the dawn of civilization to today Explains the worldwide disparities in living standards and population we see today Provides a comprehensive overview of the three phases of the development process Analyzes the Malthusian theory and its empirical support Examines theories of demographic transition and their empirical significance Explores the interaction between economic development and human evolution
