The Great Stagnation is the title of Tyler Cowen‘s most recent investigation.
It has, as it says in the video I posted down here, a two-fold explanation, one anecdotal and one that receives the help of statistics. I will not spoil it for you, but suffice it to say that the main thesis is: innovation comes in plateaus, and once we arrived at the low hanging fruit of innovation (the big breakthroughs), the following will be a series of improvements and perfections to what has already been implemented. This we may perceive as a part of a slowing-down slope in the standard of living improvement indexes.
Arriving at the next plateau is certainly a challenge, but the fact that the title implies stagnation, it is more likely to be a speed reduction.
Here’s Tyler Cowen explaining it on a TEDx event:
Continuing (and lively) discussion
The distribution method for Tyler’s book has provided an infrastructure for other people to join the conversation. Here are some cases in point:
- A PBS documentary on the topic.
- The Great Stagnation and the environment
- Data Mining and (not explicitly though) the Great Stagnation
- The Great Ephemeralization
- TGS in Agriculture
- Russ Roberts’ EconTalk with Tyler Cowen on TGS
- Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan and David Henderson from Econlog on the topic
