Quote:
Originally Posted by Marleinie
For our time, what would need to be done for your average joe to have the same opportunities today as one would have had in the 1950s?
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I am a guy but what about the average Jane? Ok, just kidding and leaving aside the obvious distinctions about discrimination in the 50's I am going to paint a rather realistic but not particularly optimistic picture about the future.
It has been shown, both theoretically and empirically, that
technological progress is the main driver of long-run economic growth.
Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern, wrote a book in 2016 called, "
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War," which covers this topic comprehensively.
In a nutshell, he argues that technological progress is the key to what drives economic growth and promotes higher standards of living. Moreover, the periods of great technological progress have come and gone and are not likely to resurface anytime soon.
The period from 1870 to 1940 was the most transformative while the period from 1945 to 1970 was also strong just not as revolutionary.
Specifically, he has argued that the
I.T. revolution is less important than any one of the five Great Inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication.
Moreover, he argues that the benefits from the I.T. revolution pretty much came and went by the year 2000. GDP Growth in the U.S. grew above 4.0 percent for four consecutive years from 1997 through 2000. We have not seen GDP growth above 4 percent since 2000.
Gordon says that the rapid economic growth associated with the post World War II era is not coming back. Everything since has at best been a faint echo of that great wave, and Gordon doesn’t expect us to see anything similar in the coming decades.
Gordon suggests that the future is all too likely to be marked by stagnant living standards for most Americans, because the effects of slowing technological progress will be reinforced by a set of “headwinds”: rising inequality, a plateau in education levels, an aging population and more.