1 The Low-Hanging Fruit We Ate -The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) by Tyler Cowen - joblessrecovery motoredeldebito polarizzazionepolitica ortodossiadellacrescitainfinita nojetson ilperiodomagico lostudentemarginale redditomedianopiatto energiaediscriminazioni negazionistieredistribuzionisti rdaumentaeleinnivazionidiminuiscono innovazionepubblicaeprivata
The Low-Hanging Fruit We AteRead more at location 39
Note: Alcune spie inquietanti: 1) jobless recovery 2) median wage 3) aumento tenore di vita (cfr tra generazioni) 4) debiti crescenti sia ne pubblico che nel privato. Cosa ci segnala tutto ciò?... Tesi del libro: abbiamo raccolto tutti i "frutti bassi" dell'innovazione ma programmiamo le ns vite come se ce ne fossero altri disponibili... Low Hanging Fruit: terra libera, libera immigrazione, nuove tecnologie.... La Rivoluzione Industriale ha rotto gli argini dello sviluppo e la sua forza propulsiva si è fatta sentire fino al cuore del 900 ma ora sembra esaurirsi. Il PIL di tutte le nazioni + ricche rallenta in modo evidente, i guadagni di produttività seguono la stessa sorte... Tecnologia: togliete la magica intrrnet: la ns. vita è praticamente la stessa che negli anni 50. Certo, i servizi sono migliorati x qualità e affidabilità ma sono fondamentalmente ancora quelli: auto, elettrodomestoci, elettricità. Il mondo dei Jetson nn si è mai realizzato. L' uomo è andato sulla luna e pensavamo alla rivoluzione tecnologica ma nulla è successo... Istruzione: è cresciuta molto la partecipazione, difficile oggi che un talento resti infruttuoso. Anche qs via sembra satura (il tasso di partecipazione addirittura cala). Lo "studente marginale" oggi è una testa di rapa, difficile che sarà mai lui a garantirci la crescita... Discriminazione. E quando donne e altre minoranze entreranno a pieno titolo nel sistema produttivo? Anche questo "frutto basso" è stato colto nei decenni passati... Una speranza x l'immediato: i paesi poveri. Qs. economie hanno ancora molti frutti bassi da cogliere e il beneficio potrebbe estendersi anche a chi è nella palta Edit
We have been through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression,Read more at location 41
Our last three economic recoveries, beginning respectively in 2009, 2001, and 1991, have been “jobless” in nature.Read more at location 43
Median wages have risen only slowly since the 1970s,Read more at location 45
earlier generations reaped much greater gains than ours,Read more at location 46
Moreover, we face a long-run fiscal crisis, driven by the increasing cost of entitlements, our heavy reliance on debt,Read more at location 49
The problems extend to American politics. The Democratic Party seeks to expand government spending even when the middle class feels squeezed,Read more at location 51
The Republicans, when they hold power, are often a bigger fiscal disaster than the Democrats.Read more at location 53
Political discourse and behavior have become increasingly polarized, and what I like to call the “honest middle” cannot be heard above the din.Read more at location 56
problems have a single, littlenoticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years.Read more at location 58
free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies.Read more at location 64
The old understanding was that the world broke through a barrier with the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century and that we can grow economically at high rates forever.Read more at location 67
The new model is that there are periodic technological plateaus, and right now we are sitting on top of one, waiting for the next major growth revolution.Read more at location 68
That’s a sign that the pace of technological development has been slowing down.Read more at location 70
The period from 1880 to 1940 brought numerous major technological advances into our lives.Read more at location 83
list of new developments includes electricity, electric lights, powerful motors, automobiles, airplanes, household appliances, the telephone, indoor plumbing, pharmaceuticals, mass production, the typewriter, the tape recorder, the phonograph, and radio, to name just a few, with television coming at the end of that period.Read more at location 83
railroad and fast international ships were not completely new, but they expanded rapidlyRead more at location 85
agriculture saw the introduction of the harvester, the reaper, and the mowing machine, and the development of highly effective fertilizers.Read more at location 87
Today, in contrast, apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch,Read more at location 90
The wonders portrayed in The Jetsons, the space-age television cartoon from the 1960s, have not come to pass. You don’t have a jet pack. You won’t live forever or visit a Mars colony.Read more at location 91
Everyone of a certain age thinks of the 1969 moon landing as a symbolic dividing line between the new technological era and the old.Read more at location 97
What did the moon landing lead to in our everyday standard of living?Read more at location 100
By 1960, 60 percent of Americans were graduating from high school, almost ten times the rate of only sixty years earlier. This rate peaked at about 80 percent in the late 1960s and since then has fallen by about six percentage points.Read more at location 104
In other words, earlier in the twentieth century, a lot of potential geniuses didn’t get much education,Read more at location 105
Taking a smart, motivated person out of an isolated environment and sending that person to high school will bring big productivity gains.Read more at location 106
We won’t be able to replicate that kind of gain over the next century, and on college completion rates, we are moving backward in some important regards.Read more at location 108
It is someone who cannot write a clear English sentence, perhaps cannot read well, and cannot perform all the functions of basic arithmetic.Read more at location 111
one-third of the college students today will drop out, a marked rise since the 1960s, when the figure was only one in five.Read more at location 112
Educating many of these students is possible, it is desirable, and we should do more of it, but it is not like grabbing low-hanging fruit.Read more at location 116
The problem is not that we are likely to regress, but rather where the future growth in living standards will come from.Read more at location 121
Some other nominations for low-hanging fruit would be cheap fossil fuelsRead more at location 123
One might argue that we have ongoing and future low-hanging fruit in the form of limiting job market discrimination against women, African Americans, and other unfairly treated groups.Read more at location 127
Still, we’ve already seen a lot of these gains in the last forty to fifty years,Read more at location 129
A lot of the world, by the way, has a form of low-hanging fruit that the United States does not,Read more at location 135
Borrow and implement the best technologies and institutional ideas of North America, Europe, and Japan. Sometimes economists call this “catch-up growth.”Read more at location 136
U.S. median income growth—measuringRead more at location 143
The American left has pointed out and indeed stressed measures of stagnant median income, but it usually blames politics, insufficient redistribution, or poor educational opportunities rather than considering the idea of a technological plateau.Read more at location 165
The American right is more likely to deny the relevance of the slow-growth numbers,Read more at location 167
One common criticism of the numbers is that median household income is falling mainly because households are getting smaller.Read more at location 170
Since 1989, the size-adjusted and size-unadjusted measures have been rising at roughly the same rate,Read more at location 171
A further criticism of median income measures is that our statistics overestimate the rate of price inflation and so inflation-adjusted incomes are higher than the numbers indicate.Read more at location 174
although the modern world offers a lot of unmeasured quality improvements, it also brings a lot of new problems that aren’t included in traditional measures of income: Think AIDS and traffic jams.Read more at location 176
Even if the post-1973 era has a lot of unmeasured quality improvements, so does the pre-1973 era. In fact, income measures are most likely to understate growth during times when a lot of new goods are introduced into the marketplaceRead more at location 179
Looking at 1950-1993, he found that 80 percent of the growth from that period came from the application of previously discovered ideas, combined with heavy additional investmentRead more at location 187
we are discovering new ideas at a speed that will drive a future growth rate of less than one-third of a percentRead more at location 189
It could be worse yet if the idea-generating countries continue to lose population, as we are seeing in Western Europe and Japan.Read more at location 191
It’s also possible to measure innovation directly. From Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner, here is one graph showing the rate of global innovation relative to population (on the vertical axis) since medieval times:Read more at location 192
It’s not because everyone back then was so well educated—quite the contrary, hardly anyone went to college—but rather because innovation was easier and it could be done by amateurs.Read more at location 198
The average rate of innovation peaks in 1873, which is more or less the beginning of the move toward the modern world of electricity and automobiles. The rate of innovations also plummets after about 1955, which heralds the onset of a technological slowdown.Read more at location 199
relative to national income or expenditures on education, we are innovating less than in the nineteenth century.Read more at location 201
modern innovations bring only slight additional benefits to the majority of the population.Read more at location 205
Across the years 1965 to 1989, employment in research and development doubled in the United States, tripled in West Germany and France, and quadrupled in Japan.Read more at location 206
The United States produced more patents in 1966 (54,600) than in 1993 (53,200). “Patents per researcher” has been falling for most of the twentieth century.Read more at location 208
A lot of our recent innovations are “private goods” rather than “public goods.”Read more at location 210
The dubious financial innovations connected to our recent financial crisis are another (perhaps less obvious) example of discoveries that benefit some individuals but are not public goodsRead more at location 214
The slowdown in ideas production mirrors the well-known rise in income inequality.Read more at location 222
The “rise in income inequality” and the “slowdown in ideas production” are two ways of describing the same phenomenon, namely that current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods.Read more at location 225
Note: INNOVAZIONE PUBBLICA E PRIVATA
