From NBER Working Paper 26061: Enrico Spolaore: Commanding Nature by Obeying Her; A Review Essay on Joel Mokyr's Culture of Growth
Abstract:
Why is modern society capable of cumulative innovation? In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr persuasively argues that sustained technological progress stemmed from a change in cultural beliefs. The change occurred gradually during the seventeenth and eighteenth century and was fostered by an intellectual elite that formed a transnational community and adopted new attitudes toward the creation and diffusion of knowledge, setting the foundation for the ethos of modern science. The book is a significant contribution to the growing literature that links culture and economics. This review discusses Mokyr’s historical analysis in relation to the following questions: What is culture and how should we use it in economics? How can culture explain modern economic growth? Will the culture of growth that caused modern prosperity persist in the future?
This essay is highly recommended. Link here.
From the eminent Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, a new working paper on the productivity slowdown in the West.
Abstract:
Measured between quarters with identical unemployment rates, U. S. economic growth slowed by more than half from 3.2 percent per year during 1970-2006 to only 1.4 percent during 2006-16, and only half of this GDP growth slowdown is accounted for diminished productivity growth. The paper starts from the proposition that GDP growth matters, not just productivity growth, because slower GDP growth provides fewer resources to address the nation's problems, including faltering education, aging infrastructure, and the looming shortfall in funding for Social Security and Medicare, and it also implies lower net investment and a reduced rate at which new capital can embody the latest technology.
The paper documents the contribution to slower GDP growth of the separate components of demography -- fertility, mortality, life expectancy, and immigration. Particular emphasis is placed on the interaction between rising inequality and the slower secular rise of life expectancy in the U.S. compared to other developed countries, both in the form of a large gap in life expectancy between rich and poor, and the stagnation of life expectancy for the lowest income quintile. Further contributions to slowing growth are made by a decline in the population share of both legal and illegal immigration and a turnaround from rising to declining labor force participation. Rising inequality creates a gap between the growth of average real per-capita income relative to that of median real income, and alternative measures of the evolution of this gap are compared and assessed.
Read more of the abstract at NBER.
