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

by Tyler Cowen

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101502259
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/25/2011
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	71
File size:	423 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of Discover Your Inner Economist and The Age of the Infovore, and he coblogs at www.marginalrevolution.com, one of the world's most influential economics blogs. He writes regularly for The New York Times and has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Wilson Quarterly, and Slate, among many other popular media outlets.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Preface to the Hardcover Edition 1

1 The Low-Hanging Fruit We Ate: Land, Technology, and Uneducated Kids 5

2 Our New (Not So) Productive Economy: Government, Health Care, and Education 23

3 Does the Internet Change Everything?: Price, Production, and Revenue 45

4 The Government of Low-Hanging Fruit: Left, Right, and Upside Down 55

5 Why Did We Have Such a Big Financial Crisis?: Bankers, Museum Directors, You, and Me 69

6 Can We Fix Things?: The Great Difference Then and Now 81

Notes 91

Index 103

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"As Cowen makes clear, many of this era's technological breakthroughs produce enormous happiness gains, but surprisingly little economic activity." —-David Brooks, The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

"As Cowen makes clear, many of this era's technological breakthroughs produce enormous happiness gains, but surprisingly little economic activity." ---David Brooks, The New York Times

From the Publisher