The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton

Over time, an increasing percentage of what we spend on government is spent on optional rather than core services because the core services tend to have been around longer. Another way of putting it is to say that the marginal value of added government, even if positive, falls as government grows larger. This statement is not antigovernment; it’s j

real income growth, widely distributed, of about 2 to 3 percent a year. Maybe that sounds good to you, but if you’ve read this far, you know I think it is currently impossible. We don’t have the low-hanging fruit to make such a scenario real.

Keep in mind that median income growth has been slow, and stock prices—the valuation of capital—haven’t made lasting progress in a long time. As of the fall of 2010, the S&P 500 is more or less back where it had been in the mid-1990s. As economist Michael Mandel puts it, if neither labor nor capital is reaping much gain, can we really trust the

All of these problems have a single, littlenoticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. We have built social and economic institutions on the expectation of a lot of low-hanging fruit, but that fruit is mostly gone.

“Patents per researcher” has been falling for most of the twentieth century.

We’re valuing dollars spent on highway extensions as if they were worth as much as the dollars we spent on building the core roads that link major cities.

A lot of the growth of the United States, up through the 1970s or so, has been based on these three forms of low-hanging fruit. Each of them is pretty much gone today.

Productivity per man hour went up mostly because the number of man hours went down. “Discovering who isn’t producing very much and firing them” has been the biggest productivity gain in the last few years. That’s good for some capitalists and consumers, but again compare it to the widely distributed productivity gains of the early part of the twent

In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies. Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recogn

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