Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds

By Robert J. Gordon. 2013

867 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow’s seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. The paper views the future from 2007 while pretending that the financial crisis did not happen.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/968d539f3242f3366eca67896423ee993046b5a6

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Citations in the corpus

Endogenous Technology Adoption and R&D as Sources of Business Cycle Persistence (2019, background): “The downward trend in R&D productivity actually begins in the mid 1990s, which is consistent with Gordon (2012)’s hypothesis of a secular”
Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from US Patents (2020, unknown): “See Jorgenson et al. (2008), Gordon (2012), Boldrin and Levine (2013), and Arora et al. (2018).”
Welfare systems without economic growth: A review of the challenges and next steps for the field (2021, background): “However, some prominent economists have begun again to explore the notion that wealthy nations across the OECD may be in a long-term economic slump, referred to in the literature as ‘secular stagnation’ (Gordon, 2012; Teulings and Baldwin, 2014; Summers, 2015; Jackson, 2017).”
Productivity growth in Italy: a tale of a slow-motion change (2018, unknown): “Some scholars have seen in these developments worrying signals of a “secular stagnation”: Gordon (2012) claims that future economic growth may slow further owing to a number of structural issues related to the supply-side and common to most developed countries like demography, inequality,…”
Demographic Structure and Macroeconomic Trends (2019, unknown): “Robert Gordon (2012) asks how much further could the frontier growth rate decline?”
Inflation in Emerging and Developing Economies: Evolution, Drivers, and Policies (2018, background): “Some argue that it is explained by a fall in the economy´s long-run potential growth rate (e.g., Gordon, 2012).”