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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 by [Tyler Cowen]

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Tyler Cowen

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) Format: Kindle Edition

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Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise.

America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from?

As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the 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. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy.

In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Print length

128 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Dutton
Publication date

January 25, 2011
Reading age

18 years and up
File size

664 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for The Great Stagnation

“The most debated nonfiction book so far this year...As Cowen makes clear, many of this era’s technological breakthroughs produce enormous happiness gains, but surprisingly little economic activity.”—David Brooks, The New York Times

“One of the most talked-about books among economists right now.”—Renee Montagne, Morning Edition, NPR

“Tyler Cowen may very well turn out to be this decade’s Thomas Friedman.”—Kelly Evans, The Wall Street Journal

“Cowen's book...will have a profound impact on the way people think about the last thirty years.”—Ryan Avent, Economist.com

About the Author

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of Discover Your Inner Economist and The Age of the Infovore, and he coblogs at www.marginalrevolution.com, one of the world's most influential economics blogs. He writes regularly for The New York Times and has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Wilson Quarterly, and Slate, among many other popular media outlets.

ASIN : B004H0M8QS
Publisher : Dutton; 0 edition (January 25, 2011)
Publication date : January 25, 2011
Language : English
File size : 664 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 128 pages
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #87,543 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #18 in Macroeconomics (Kindle Store)
- #21 in Business Planning & Forecasting (Kindle Store)
- #33 in Economic Policy & Development (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
165 ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

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Richard

Good but obvious ideas lengthened to a book

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2018

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Good but obvious ideas lengthened to a book. I found myself skimming and the book and putting it down because it was a poor return on time. Essentially half the book can be summarized in a few sentences: we haven’t invented much technology that improves human standard of living in 50 years, the internet being the main exception. Government, healthcare, and education are inefficient and money spent there is a poor measure of total value creates, so don’t trust GDP numbers. The internet creates a bunch of value but it isn’t totally measured in revenue (that is the value of a photo you liked) and doesn’t create a lot of jobs.

I was really hoping for a book that spent less time discussing these simple facts, and more time analyzing our way out of this. The last chapter on this topic felt a bit fluffy.

18 people found this helpful

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Jason D. Sands

Good read

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2016

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This is more of a long essay than a book. Cowen's analysis will discomfort both the left and the right. Basically, he argues that because economic growth has stagnated, we can't afford the tax cuts that the right typically calls for and we can't afford the expanded welfare state that the left desires. He argues that growth has stagnated, because the US has picked all the low hanging economic fruit. We've expanded across the continent, we face more international competition, and the rate of technological innovation has slowed down. He is short on specific solutions. Generally he says that we need to rethink how we educate people, we need to value scientists more socially, we need to encourage innovation, and for the time being, we need to lower our expectations.

15 people found this helpful

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Alex Bush

Short, potent, and valuable

Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2015

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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.

8 people found this helpful

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WiseOldOwl?

Important Book - Short, Easy Reading

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2020

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This author comes to the point; makes his points; and does so without needing several hundred pages to do it. His proposition is that the development of the dominant US economy was significantly assisted by cheap land (we took it from the American Indians), cheap labor (slaves and immigrant labor), a fortuitous time in history (our country was developing just as the Industrial Revolution was developing), and cheap education (early on we developed a good system of universities, including land grant universities in the states). These ideas are significant in working to understand where we are today, and what we need to do to keep our country competitive.

One person found this helpful

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Mec

Short and cogent

Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2012

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Cowen makes a number of points in a surprisingly short essay. (Shorter is better, I'm paying for points made, not pages used to make them.)

First is that economic progress depends on (among other factors) technological innovation. So far so good; this is nearly a truism. Cowen goes on to say that technological innovation is lumpy (yes) and that the period 1980-2010 is actually a period of low, rather than high, innovation. That last point got my attention. I agree. However, the argument needs more evidence here -- how do you measure worldwide technological innovation over, say, a decade, and then compare that with other decades? On the surface, one can say: electric light + automobile + telegraph + radio (inventions from 1880 - 1920) beat all the inventions from 1970 - 2010 (Internet, and, well, what else?)

Cowen also says: it's difficult to measure increases in human satisfaction ("welfare" is the economic term but some readers may take that to mean something else, so I'll say "human satisfaction" instead). Government outputs that increase human satisfaction are difficult to measure, so economists fall back to measuring the cost of the inputs instead. That leads to self-justified government programs: a 20-person department must be better than a 10-person department because it costs twice as much.

The Internet, the great invention of the past 30 years, poses a similar problem. The internet has taken out so many costs that it's hard to measure human satisfaction from nearly cost-free goods! For example, I bought a copy of "Up from Slavery" for $0.00 from amazon.com. I enjoyed reading it and it inspired me. But how can an economist measure how much better off I am? The Internet has created a mountain of unquantifiable consumer surplus.

If stagnation comes from low innovation, then how does one increase innovation? Cowen offers one proposal: offer more respect to scientists and engineers. Give less of your adoration to entertainers of various types and more of it to people actually improving the world. By itself, this isn't very actionable. However, Cowen points out that some cultures respect engineers more than other cultures, and he predicts that societies with such cultures are going to do better in the future.

10 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

liamado

Well written nonsense

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 10, 2018

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Cowen has an engaging writing style, but not enough to distract from the drivellous content. He identifies an interesting point about innovation, but his explanations for it sound more like the ramblings of a pensioner complaining about how 'things were better in the old days'. His constant berating of the left is tiresome and unhelpful. His 'solution' that we should 'value scientists more' is bizzarre and he puts forward no suggestions as to how to achieve it. I found this book referenced and decided to give it a look, but I quite regret the time wasted. Luckily it's only a quick read

Amazon Customer

The Great Stagnation reflects one side of the macroeconomics debate regarding ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 31, 2016

Verified Purchase

The Great Stagnation reflects one side of the macroeconomics debate regarding growth. Cowen argues that we are inventing less, at least less economically powerful inventions. The internet - the obvious exception - is often revenue-light and so doesn't help growth.
The ebook is presented in a short format - easy to read, and gives a very readable summary of the academics

Amazon Customer

some good insights - but tends to be repetitive after a while...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 24, 2013

Verified Purchase

Some good ideas and observations. Not so well put forward as after a few pages it sounds a bit like a broken record player: no more low hanging fruit, no more low hanging fruit, no more...

One person found this helpful

Mrs.S.

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2014

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a present

Anglian Traveller

Tyler Cowen brings a fresh perspective to economic slowdown in an easy-read text

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2011

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Tyler Cowen's `The Great Stagnation' is less a full-length book than an extended essay which attempts to explain current economic and median-income stagnation in the USA, and what might happen in the future. The author's basic idea is that between 1880 and 1970 the USA benefited from an abundance of `low-hanging fruit': almost limitless land resources relative to population; technological breakthroughs like electricity, indoor plumbing, railroads, automobiles, radio, telephones, tape recorders, mass production and the availability of reliably tested pharmaceuticals; and a continuous supply of first-generation immigrant labor to do all the hard jobs at low rates of pay. This party is now over, and the hangover has set in.

Cowen's analysis of historical trends in technological innovation reveals a plateau since the 1970s in the adoption and wide dissemination of useful new technologies: i.e. like in the 1970s we still drive cars powered by gasoline, and use refrigerators and TVs; they're just incrementally improved but not radically different in concept. Now they're made elsewhere in the world by newly industrialised economies which have imitated the industrial practices of the US and Europe, and are imported rather than home-produced. The newer technologies like the internet and cell phones are for communications, and don't need a lot of workers to run them.

The author goes on to analyse the incremental value of increasing spend on education, which he sees as offering diminishing economic returns, and writes an excellent section analysing healthcare spending - again, beyond a certain point doubling spending offers smaller and smaller incremental returns in health benefits. Cowen uses a graph to demonstrate that although every major European country has a total healthcare expenditure per capita of less than half that of the USA, they all have longer life-expectancy and lower infant mortality - so it's not to do with money per se, but how things are done and how the money is used.

The author's fix-it ideas include raising the social esteem in which scientists are held: well, amen to that, but is that really going to make a big difference? The biggest earners in the USA are now in the financial sector. Trading credit default swaps, derivatives and securitised financial products may enrich the tiny part of the workforce concerned with such chimera, but they tend to relatively impoverish everyone else and do not spread wealth around as in the industrial age, when millions of people were employed in designing and making real, useful things which improved people's lives and which everybody wanted. Cowen predicts we might be in for a longer and deeper economic recession before new scientific innovations can renew society again, and that the rate of progress will remain uneven and people might "look back to the current era with a gloss of nostalgia" - hardly an optimistic prognosis.

The text of this hardcover was originally an e-book, printed to take in new audiences and offer a more permanent artefact than an online blog. Despite its shortcomings its 89 pages present punchy, lucid arguments and make for an easy read of a few hours, brevity and clarity among its chief recommendations.

5 people found this helpful