Results for “no great stagnation” 495 found
Assorted links
1. How to make money? I'm not convinced.
3. Richard Freeman selects and discusses five books on labor unions.
4. The Facebook page for our Modern Principles text; it offers a steady stream of in-class resources.
5. Nicholas Kristof on Timur Kuran and Islam.
6. Should scientists be more Luddite? (pdf) An uneven but interesting piece.
Assorted links
1. A skeptical take on recovery and private credit conditions.
2. Ugandan English.
3. Russ Roberts on Canadian income data. Will Wilkinson on Canada. And Arnold Kling, slouching toward the great stagnation. Via CFM, the McKenzie productivity study reflects evidence of the growth slowdown.
4. Pay the homeless.
5. Via Jonah Lehrer, how trivial choices suck us in and trick us (pdf).
6. Humans can use echolocation, and a fascinating story as well.
7. Robin Hanson and Karl Smith on AI, Bloggingheads.TV, self-recommending.
Assorted links
1. Timothy Noah reviews TGS for Slate. And a review from Dagblog.
2. Why do protests bring regimes down?
3. The numbers.
4. EcoATMs: cash on the spot for your battered machines.
6. Libya fact of the day: urban stagnation.
8. Markets in everything: New Zealand edition (disgusting, but safe for work).
Assorted links
Assorted links
1. Prepare for health care ping pong.
2. Car insurance in Rio fell over 15 percent in price, in 2010 (Portuguese link, 37 percent in some cases).
5. Which proposition is this story evidence for?
Assorted links
Interfluidity has a dream
A few nights ago, a gentleman accosted me in a dream and declared himself to be “Tyrone”, Tyler Cowen’s evil twin. Tyrone told me that his brother had “as usual” got it all backwards. In fact, he told me, we’ve been in the Great Stagnation for a century as a result of, rather than for the lack of, technological progress. The median household is experiencing wealth stagnation caused by technological change. Households are feeling the pain now more than in the past, even despite a relatively modest pace of change, because over the past few decades we have managed to avoid employing the sort of durable and effective countermeasures to stagnation that have succeeded in the past.
Here is much more, interesting throughout. Here is another excellent sentence:
I worry that specialization in the information asymmetry industry could be an antidevelopment strategy for developed countries.
Bloggingheads with Matt Yglesias
The topic is The Great Stagnation, find the dialogue here. My favorite part was when we both discussed why we find David Ricardo an interesting thinker. One way of summing up TGS is to cite local diminishing returns and yet longer-run increasing returns, though right now we're on the diminishing segment of that curve. Ricardo got the first part right, and it took the world some number of decades to prove him wrong about the longer run. TGS is a book set in the traditions of classical economics, which was a lot of the first economics I ever read.
Podcast with Russ Roberts
You'll find it here, it's about The Great Stagnation. I thought it was a very good dialogue. It focused on the areas where you might expect Russ Roberts to disagree with the main argument, and we covered a lot of meaty territory, including a good discussion of Julian Simon and the political economy of admitting that growth has slowed down.
The history of U.S. productivity, in a nutshell
There have been some recent confusions in the comments about the historical record on productivity. The excellent Alexander J. Field sets it straight, after noting that TFP (Total Factor Productivity) growth in the interwar years was remarkably strong:
…TFP persisted at high although more modest rates during the golden age (1948-73). But then it ground to an almost complete halt between 1973 and 1995. Output per hour continued to rise, albeit much more slowly, but this was almost entirely attributable to physical capital deepening. Data are now available for the entire century, and it is no longer possible to interpret the high rate of TFP advance during the interwar years that prompted the Abramowitz/Solow generalization [TC: the generalization was about knowledge-based progress] as a defining characteristic of the century as a whole.
In this context, think of TFP as the growth due to new ideas, rather than just throwing capital or labor at a problem or production process. Here is a related Field paper. It's also wrong to think of the post-WWII period as the peak of progress, rather as Field shows high TFP growth starts post Civil War and the time after WWII is somewhat slower than many previous decades. The early 19th century, by the way, was not so splendid for TFP.
The critical responses to The Great Stagnation prefer to attack median income measures and in general they are reluctant to talk about total factor productivity. Yet we are pointed very much toward the same conclusion. My first post on TGS also considered these issues and you will find some relevant Charles Jones papers here.
Assorted links
Assorted links
1. Are these positive or negative graveyard externalities?
2. Mark Steckbeck on TGS, and Steve Horwitz. And Steve Sailer. More from Bryan.
3. The mud brick architecture of Yemen.
4. What are the bestsellers in the Netherlands? I just ordered book #1, which leads by a long way.
6. Prophets of the Marginal Revolution (hat tip to Bryan Caplan, who oddly implies I predicted incorrectly).
Assorted links
1. Via Chris F. Masse, is Star Wars a remix?
2. When is death an aphrodisiac?
3. David Henderson on TGS. And more from Michael Mandel. And Bryan Caplan, you can scroll down there for additional posts.
Household size and stagnant median income
One loyal MR reader writes to me:
However, census Bureau data show that the size of the average US household decreased from 3.1 to 2.6 from 1970 to 2007…
The underlying question is whether figures for the median household are underrating the true growth in average living standards. A few points are in order.
1. Here is one passage from The Great Stagnation: "Since 1989, the size-adjusted and size – unadjusted measures have been rising at roughly the same rate, and post-1979 the difference between the size-adjusted and the size-unadjusted median income measures is never more than 0.3 percent." For more on this, see Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heidi Shierholz, The State of Working America 2008/2009, chapter one.
2. David Leonhardt writes: "In fact, households were shrinking more quickly in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s than they are now – and incomes were growing." Read the rest of this post as well.
3. That households are smaller decreases the aid and assistance available to those living in them.
4. There are an increasing number of women in the labor force, and that factor biases the household number to be higher than true productivity growth alone would dictate. Unmeasured household production is a mix of "lower than it would have been" or more harried than it would have been. I suspect this is a large effect, not a small effect.
5. On the issue of students and retirees, see the adjustments performed by Lane Kenworthy, pp.37-38.
Overall I do not see that changing household size allows one to dismiss the notion of relatively stagnant median income.
My video dialogue with Nick Schulz
Find it here, and Nick's summary is very good:
In my conversation with Tyler about his new and much-debated book, The Great Stagnation, I was particularly struck by his explanation (at around 21:30) for how he came to embrace the idea that we are experiencing an innovation slowdown. His remarks about Julian Simon are also very noteworthy.
It would be an innovation for this blog if I could embed, but alas it is not to be…