Trade Arithmetic for David Brooks

The NYT has been sponsoring a competition between Thomas Friedman and David Brooks to see who can say more silly things about the economy. Brooks has a couple of good entries in today's column. Brooks told readers that:

"There's strong evidence to suggest that the rate of technological innovation has been slowing down."

Actually there is zero evidence to support this assertion. The standard measure of technological innovation is productivity growth. This was close to 3.0 percent annually...