New York magazine has a fascinating article (from last month) examining the truly terrifying economic analysis of Northwestern’s Robert Gordon.
If nothing like the first and second industrial revolutions had ever happened before, what is to say that anything similar will happen again? Then, perhaps, the global economic slump that we have endured since 2008 might not merely be the consequence of the burst housing bubble, or financial entanglement and overreach, or the coming generational trauma of the retiring baby boomers, but instead a glimpse at a far broader change, the slow expiration of a historically singular event. Perhaps our fitful post-crisis recovery is no aberration.
Gordon’s research suggests as much. You can watch him summarize it in the video below.
MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson offers a rebuttal below.
But as the New York piece makes clear, a deeper dive into the research suggests that Brynjolfsson’s view isn’t as far from Gordon’s as we might like. Don’t do any research into this if you’re already depressed. It’s very important but even more sobering.
Have a good week-end.
Above the Market 
Thank you for getting your readers be aware of this remarkable exchange.
If I may let me give my 2 cents to the debate. I feel that both are both right and wrong. Right because it is hard to argue with some of their respective arguments, but both wrong because both do not answer what I think is a more fundamental question: how we as human beings are adapting to the pace of change without having to be simply unadapted to deal with it or said in other way: how change of the sheer magnitude (internet/robot) that affect us and is initiated by a more and more minute part of our society will not come one day to haunt a more and more significant part of our society that does not access it or become so dependent on it that they become the new slave population of the 21st century without knowing it up until they rebel against it.
Ah yes, the race is still on for who can predict the most gloomy, pessimistic, next-depression-worse-than-the-last, free-fall to the bottom forecast for U.S. and world economies. Good grief!
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