Cowen, Phelps, and other “stagnationists” hold that only higher rates of innovation and technical progress will lift the economy out of its current doldrums.

and focus on working-age households, real median income has actually fallen from $60,746 to $55,821. This is the first decade to see declining median income since the figures were first compiled. Median net worth also declined this past decade when adjusted for inflation, another first.

A variant on this explanation is not that America has stagnated, but that other nations such as India and China have begun to catch up. In a global economy, America businesses and workers can’t earn a premium if they don’t have greater productivity than their counterparts in other nations. Technology has eliminated many of the barriers of geography

Whole eras of technical progress and economic growth appear to be driven by … GPTs, [which are] characterized by pervasiveness (they are used as inputs by many downstream sectors), inherent potential for technical improvements, and “innovational complementarities,” meaning that the productivity of R&D in downstream sectors increases as a

We’ll start with skill-biased technical change, which is perhaps the most carefully studied of the three phenomena. This is technical change that increases the relative demand for high-skill labor while reducing or eliminating the demand for low-skill labor.

The threat of technological unemployment is real. To understand this threat, we'll define three overlapping sets of winners and losers that technical change creates: (1) high-skilled vs. low-skilled workers, (2) superstars vs. everyone else, and (3) capital vs. labor.

But at the same time, the computer, like all general purpose technologies, requires parallel innovation in business models, organizational processes structures, institutions, and skills. These intangible assets, comprising both organizational and human capital, are often ignored on companies’ balance sheets and in the official GDP statistics, but

We’ll call this the “end of work” argument, after Jeremy Rifkin’s 1995 book of the same title. In it, Rifkin laid out a bold and disturbing hypothesis: that “we are entering a new phase in world history—one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.”

We don’t believe in the coming obsolescence of all human workers. In fact, some human skills are more valuable than ever, even in an age of incredibly powerful and capable digital technologies. But other skills have become worthless, and people who hold the wrong ones now find that they have little to offer employers. They’re losing the race