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The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton Kindle Edition

by Tyler Cowen (Author)

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America is in disarray and our economy is failing us. We have been through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, unemployment remains stubbornly high, and talk of a double-dip recession persists. Americans are not pulling the world economy out of its sluggish state -- if anything we are looking to Asia to drive a recovery.Median wages have risen only slowly since the 1970s, and this multi-decade stagnation is not yet over. By contrast, the living standards of earlier generations would double every few decades. The Democratic Party seeks to expand government spending even when the middle class feels squeezed, the public sector doesn’t always perform well, and we have no good plan for paying for forthcoming entitlement spending. To the extent Republicans have a consistent platform, it consists of unrealistic claims about how tax cuts will raise revenue and stimulate economic growth. The Republicans, when they hold power, are often a bigger fiscal disaster than the Democrats. How did we get into this mess?Imagine a tropical island where the citrus and bananas hang from the trees. Low-hanging literal fruit -- you don’t even have to cook the stuff.In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century: free land; immigrant labor; and powerful new technologies. 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 barer than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.The problem won’t be solved overnight, but there are reasons to be optimistic. We simply have to recognize the underlying causes of our past prosperity—low hanging fruit—and how we will come upon more of it.

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Product Details

File Size: 672 KB
Print Length: 128 pages
Publisher: Dutton (January 25, 2011)
Publication Date: January 25, 2011
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B004H0M8QS
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

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Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #171,034 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #30 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Planning & Forecasting
- #83 in Books > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Planning & Forecasting
- #269 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Women in History

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3.7 out of 5 stars

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2 star		9%
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169 of 185 people found the following review helpful

Great essay, wish people would read it before reviewing it

By Chuck Crane on October 30, 2011

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

Some reviewers have done a good job here, but some have utterly missed major points, if they have read the essay at all, which I doubt, so I will give potential readers an outline.

I. The low-hanging fruit we ate
..A. Examples in the United States
....1. Free land (Homestead Act, etc.)
....2. Technological breakthroughs (electricity, motor vehicles, telephone, radio, television, computers etc.)
....3. Smart, uneducated kids (who were made productive through excellent public education).
....4. This is a partial list; clearly other candidates can be proposed, e.g. cheap fossil fuels.
..B. Examples in other countries ("catch-up growth")
....1. Leveraging the technological breakthroughs of the West (e.g. China, India)
....2. Smart, uneducated kids (e.g. China, India)
..C. MEDIAN income growth in the U.S. has slowed notably since 1973.
....1. Decline in household size is not the cause.
....2. Unmeasured quality improvements (think electronic gadgetry) are not a counter (because there is
...... also unmeasured quality degradation, think traffic jams and AIDS)
..D. Rate of technical innovation has declined notably since 1873 and even more since 1955
....1. Innovation is getting harder; the low fruit has been picked.
....2. Recent innovations have slight marginal benefits
..E. Recent and current innovation is more geared to PRIVATE goods than to PUBLIC goods.
....**This is the driver of the Great Stagnation.
....1. Extracting resources from the government (subsidies for solar power, farm products, other junk;
.....useless construction; useless government employees; legal services, etc.) by lobbying.
....2. Extreme protections of intellectual property (e.g.Read more ›

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Read for some insights on the problems, not the predictable answers conclusions he ends on

By C. D. Varn on October 17, 2014

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

Cowen's discussion of the technological plateau and move away from innovation in the productive economy is insightful at first. He is right that the 30 year cycle we saw with major innovations in most fields seemed to stop in the 1960s, and these cycles have shifted. He does mention as a off-hand aside that this was partly because of stolen land, and he does seem to talk about educational plateaus. He mentions India and China, and then things start to slide. For example, he seems to think marketizing schools would make them more proficient. I realize this is gospel in most George Mason economics circles, but there is actually no evidence for and plenty of evidence against it. See the competition in the for-profit (not merely private) sector of higher ed in the states--it is basically consists of things that are barely above diploma mills. Cowen might reply that this is due to the distorting factor of loans: then he should actually study China, Korea, and Latin America. There is a glut of for-profit private education there as well, and it exists without the government loan system in the US, so the market failures cannot be explained by rent-seeking behavior alone.

His answers are standard center-right economist answers even if he is much better at spotting the problems. He does not deny the centralization of wealth, nor is dishonest about tax breaks. It is sad that conservatism in the United States has come to those two talking points alone because otherwise it would be clear where Cowen's ideological presumptions lie. For example, he briefly says that the Reagan (or Volker) revolution set the US right, but he has already proved economic stagnation continued unabated since the 1960s forward. Both statements can't be truth.Read more ›

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Short, potent, and valuable

By Alex Bush on June 20, 2015

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

I didn't read this book until 2015 and still found a great deal of valuable lessons. Tyler Cowen is one of my favorite applied economics writers because of his ability to convey complex concepts in easy-to-understand forms. I have minimal economics training but this book helped me better understand why our (American and the world's) economic situation is the way it is and how to be better prepared for the future. Obviously this book doesn't get into the complexities of many contemporary economic issues (it's less than 100 pages), but it conveyed its big, bold concept (that the economic slowdown of the last decade is an inevitable process) in a clear and persuasive manner. I really liked the metaphor of low-hanging fruit (which is used repeatedly throughout the book), as it helped me conceptualize the rather abstract concept of national/global economics in a tangible, visceral manner.

I would highly recommend reading this, either in kindle or hardcover form.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

The Short Unhappy Economic Life of Modern America

By Dakotadoc on January 3, 2014

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

In September 2008 I taught a graduate social policy course at Arizona State University West. The economy was going into a crazy spiral and I felt obligated to explain why to my students. They sat back in total disbelief as I predicted massive unemployment, a rapid decline in the stock market, a serious decline in public revenues resulting in a loss of public sector jobs, and very high rates of foreclosures. For them, America had always been a great horn of plenty and now, suddenly, it wasn't. They were mystified. This being Arizona, many were beginning to go into foreclosure as payments on sub-prime mortgages were increasing beyond their means. Like so many Americans, their homes were now under water and unaffordable and the public sector jobs they had anticipated getting, had all but disappeared..

For anyone who feels mystified by what's happened to America's economy, Taylor Cowen's "The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better" is a good place to start. It's a short book and, certainly, there are books that go into greater detail about the recession, but for the underlying causes, this is a good place to start. It's Cowen's contention that America has prospered without much effort through cheap labor, plentiful resources, and the positive impact of immigration, to name several. He sees an America where all the indicators point to a steady decline including the dumbing down of education so that our increasingly smart children are receiving educations that fail to prepare them for the responsibilities of democracy let alone a job market that heavily relies on technology. He also sees in both parties a political class unwilling to take on the challenges of turning things around.Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

How We Got Here Today

No nonsense explanation of the path that led us here...

Published 22 days ago by Carroll

Highly recommend it.

Quite an eye-opener! A quick read. Highly recommend it.

Published 1 month ago by J Macy

Nothing lasts forever

Good essay to understand that we cannot climb the mountain infinitely.

Published 3 months ago by Donaldo M. Dagnone

Small book in every sense of the term

Not a very powerful book. Cowen is an economist at George Mason. I took economics at George Mason.

Of course that was a very long time ago. Read more

Published 4 months ago by Patrick L. Boyle

Three Stars

it's an interesting read, but i felt it very much an overview without much support or numbers to support.

Published 5 months ago by SnowDreamer

... it I think the fundamental thesis (which mirrors writers like...

I was intrigued by Cowen's thesis (which is that economic growth in the future will be considerably moderated) - but as I have thought about it I think the fundamental thesis... Read more

Published 6 months ago by Jonathan Brown

not bad

Pretty good for an educational book, wasn't bad at all. It was short and sweet. Read it for my government class and probably the best read I've ever been required to do.

Published 9 months ago by Dina T.

Short, highly informative book

Very good analysis of our post-crisis economy and where we go from here. The book is a fast read and short, but the pages are packed with thoughtful analysis. Well worth getting.

Published 10 months ago by John Meola

a clear and succinct treatise

The book nicely summarizes the issues that developed countries and in particular US face. It is devoid of left or right wing biases and strives to present the author's analysis in... Read more

Published 11 months ago by New Hampshire

Worthwhile reading

Although this is not the first time I have read some of the reasons given here for the lack of growth and the present stagnation (in the USA and in other parts of the world) I... Read more

Published 11 months ago by Juan M. Sansinenea

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