Seven Theses on Technology and the US Economy

Over the past five years, including while writing The Innovation Delusion with Andy Russell, I have been reading a number of works that paint a similar picture of technology and the economy in the United States. Yet often they aren’t in conversation together, I decided to write this post, structured as seven interrelated theses, synthesizing the picture as I see it today with the hope that it will be useful to others.

1. The 1950s-1970s — An Extraordinary Time

Many current discussions of technological and economic change start from the rapid period of economic growth and technological development that took place between roughly 1950 and 1970. To some degree, this is a bit unfair. As historian Marc Levinson put it in the title of his book on the period, it was An Extraordinary Time. Levinson’s book is the best account we have so far of how multiple factors led to the exceptional increase in growth between World War II and the 1970s and how multiple factors led to its decline and stagnation. The point, though, is that, with brief exceptions, economic and especially technology-centered productivity growth have been slow since about 1970.

2. “Innovation” Was Meant to Be Our Savior, but It Has Failed Us

In the 1960s, just as this boom period was nearing its end, economists and policymakers fixated on technological change, or “innovation,” as the primary driver of economic growth. (Godin…