Life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone

A book that came out in January, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon, the Stanley G. Harris Professor of the the Social Sciencesat Northwestern University, has been garnering kudos across a wide ideological spectrum, as well as engendering a conversation that is more significant than most we're having these days.

George Will's NRO piece about it is a worthy contribution to that. He begins by providing a glimpse of the book's gist:

Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth argues that an unprecedented and unrepeatable “special century” of life-changing inventions has produced unrealistic expectations, so the future will disappoint: “The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique. . . . No other era in human history, either before or since, combined so many elements in which the standard of living increased as quickly and in which the human condition was transformed so completely.”

In many ways, the world of 1870 was more medieval than modern. Three necessities — food, clothing, shelter — absorbed almost all consumer spending. No household was wired for electricity. Flickering light came from candles and whale oil, manufacturing power from steam engines, water wheels, and horses. Urban horses, alive and dead, complicated urban sanitation. Window screens were rare, so insects commuted to and fro between animal and human waste outdoors and the dinner table. A typical North Carolina housewife in the 1880s carried water into her home eight to ten times daily, walking 148 miles a year to tote 36 tons of it. Few children were in school after age twelve. 

Then along came Edison's light bulb, Karl Benz's internal combustion engine, the Wright brothers' airplane, radio, Henry Ford's assembly line, air conditioning,  penicillin, heart transplants, moon landings and the like.

And then the pace of innovation, as well as economic growth slowed.

Today the inflation-adjusted median wage of American males is lower than in 1969, and median household income is lower than when this century began. If the growth rate since 1970 had matched that of 1920–1970, instead of being one-third of it, per capita GDP in 2014 would have been $97,300 instead of $50,600.

Gordon's view, shared by Will, is that neither central planning nor labor-saving gizmos will usher in another boom era:

Gordon doubts the “techno-optimists” who think exotic developments — robots, artificial intelligence, etc. — can match what such by-now-banal developments as electricity and the internal-combustion engine accomplished. There is, however, no reason to expect that medical advances have been exhausted. And there are many reasons to believe that the rapid expansion of regulatory, redistributive government, which can be reformed, has contributed to — it certainly has coincided with — the onset of (relative) economic anemia.

he “fatal conceit” (Friedrich Hayek’s term) is the optimistic delusion that planners can manage economic growth by substituting their expertise for the information generated by the billions of daily interactions of a complex market society. Gordon’s stimulating book expresses a pessimist’s fatal conceit, the belief that we know the future will be less creative than the “special century.” 

Mark Steyn made much the same point in America Alone, arguing that the past several decades have been devoid of the kinds of big inventions that so dramatically changed life for the previous two or three generations. And way back in 1941, James Burnham, in The Managerial Revolution, accurately foresaw the rise of an administrative elite that would occupy not only an increasingly bloated government but many if not most of the world's largest, bureaucratic-to-the-point-of-being-unwieldy corporations and financial institutions.

Of course, some as-yet-unrecognized mind could prove all these folks wrong. How likely is that, though, in an age in which the plodding yet comfortable pace of life has infantilized everyone from university students to presidential candidates?