Thomas Edsall’s Productivity Fears

In his NYT blog, Thomas Edsall took off from a recent paper by Northwestern university economist Robert Gordon and warned that we may see a future of very slow economic growth. While Gordon is a good economist, with many useful insights (including in this paper), it is worth throwing in a few words of caution.

First, economists’ ability to predict trends in productivity is virtually zero. There were two major shifts in productivity trends in the post-World War Ii period: the slowdown that beg...