Robert Gordon’s majestic, thousand-page treatise titled The Rise and Fall of American Growth is
best known for the argument that rapid economic growth from about 1870 to 1970
was a one-time artifact of a unique conjunction of innovations that cannot and
will not be repeated.
The declining and sluggish growth since the 1970s is
therefore not easily remedied or perhaps even remediable. Such a thesis is, of
course, heresy to the political left and right alike.
As important as the economic growth issue may be, it is not the reason I want in this
post to draw attention to Gordon’s wonderful book.*
I savored this work a bit at a time
over several weeks because I was enchanted by the “unique century” claim of Gordon’s informing thesis that
economic growth was essentially zero in human history before 1870, climbed greatly
between 1870 and 1970, after which it has declined and will continue to be low.
Because of a flurry of physical and social innovations over
1870-1970, that century can be claimed to be the single most significant one in human history. The burden of the great bulk of this extraordinarily complex
book is to, chapter after chapter, chronicle the “Great Inventions,” the
networking of American homes (water, sewer, electricity, etc.), and other
widely adopted technical and social innovations.