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.
What is uncanny is that almost nothing he reports is “new”
in the sense we do not already “know” about the long list of items such as
those just mentioned.
But through assembling “familiar” items in terms of this “unique
century” thesis, he makes them unfamiliar. The later 19th and the early and mid
20th century are made fresh again.
If asserting a mere century was pivotal to human history
seems bold, consider, further, that when he gets closer into historical details
he even begins to argue that all the
really important things happened in a mere 70 years between about 1870
and 1940. Pretty much all the major economic growth measures were achieved in that period and important changes after it have been
derivations of innovations devised by about 1940 (including television and the fundamentals of the computer).
At this point, a reader of this blog might well ask: What does this have to do with Davis history?
Well: It is Davis
history!
Even the years 1870 and 1970 themselves evoke the history frame of Davis’ founding in 1868 and its “progressive” political “revolution" in 1972. With that congruence, we are
alerted to the idea that Davis is hardly running on its own track. Instead, it
began running literally on railroad tracks (the first significant event in the
most significant century). And, growth in Davis ideologically (as well as
factually in some ways) ended in 1972 in the town’s prescient rejection of
it--a wonderfully appropriate fit with larger history.
Beyond this “cute” observation on Davis’ framing years,
there is the more serious fact that when we examine the details of the first century
of Davis history we are looking at the most significant century in human
history writ small. It is all
there and it is America, not merely Davis.
Davis history also appropriately exhibits a specialized relation
to that larger history. (1) Among these
is the fact that it was founded as a railroad town, the initial signal event. (2)
In the early and middle 20th century, it was part of the great transformation
in the form of being an outpost for government programs to apply scientific
methods to agriculture and a location in which public sector higher education
was expanded--both of which were major, national growth measures.
* * *
The events of Davis history were, of course, forged by
hard-driving civic leaders and activists who truly struggled in situations with uncertain
outcomes to build a village, a town, and a city. The events composing those
constructions were seemingly, at the time, unique and often on the verge of not
happening. Uncertainty abounded.
This “agency” picture of Davis history is both true and a
mirage. The larger contextual fact is that stories structurally identical
to those in Davis were playing out in myriad places across America. At the level of
fundamental construction, the history of Davis is virtually the same as the
histories of literally thousands of other locales.
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| Gordon, page 59. |
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| Gordon, page 60. |
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| Gordon, page 61. |
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| Gordo, page 285. |
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* Professor Gordon continues
his work on American economic growth, as in this August 8, 2016 New York Times Op-ed:
