Benjamin’s Notes & Highlights for The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
In his 2011 book The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen is definitive about the source of America’s economic woes: We are failing to understand why we are failing. All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. . . . Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think.6