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

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.

Have you ever wondered why so many developing economies—the successful ones, I mean—rise to prosperity through exports and tradable goods? There are a few reasons for this, but one is that the external world market provides a real measure of value. If you are exporting successfully, it’s not based on privilege, connections, corruption, or fakery. S

Automobiles, airplanes, and locomotives made it possible to extend the reach of modern bureaucracy across geographic space.

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

Government consumption spending, education spending, and health care spending overlap to some extent, but in total, without double counting, they still exceed 25 percent of U.S. GDP.

Overconfidence is a much bigger problem when leverage is high—that is the simple reason the banks fell so hard.

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.

The point is not that all banking is a fraud, but rather the more subtle point that we rely on the judgments of others when we decide whom to trust. For years, Madoff had been a well-respected figure in the investment community. Madoff’s fraud was possible only because so many people trusted him. The more people trusted him, the easier it was for M

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

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