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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 by [Cowen, Tyler]
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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 Kindle Edition

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3.9 out of 5 stars 8 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 672 KB
  • Print Length: 128 pages
  • Publisher: Dutton (25 Jan. 2011)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B004H0M8QS
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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  • Word Wise: Enabled
  • Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars 8 customer reviews
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #204,628 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

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4.0 out of 5 starsTyler Cowen brings a fresh perspective to economic slowdown in an easy-read text
By The Guardian TOP 50 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on 17 Oct. 2011
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Tyler Cowen's `The Great Stagnation' is less a full-length book than an extended essay which attempts to explain current economic and median-income stagnation in the USA, and what might happen in the future. The author's basic idea is that between 1880 and 1970 the USA benefited from an abundance of `low-hanging fruit': almost limitless land resources relative to population; technological breakthroughs like electricity, indoor plumbing, railroads, automobiles, radio, telephones, tape recorders, mass production and the availability of reliably tested pharmaceuticals; and a continuous supply of first-generation immigrant labor to do all the hard jobs at low rates of pay. This party is now over, and the hangover has set in.

Cowen's analysis of historical trends in technological innovation reveals a plateau since the 1970s in the adoption and wide dissemination of useful new technologies: i.e. like in the 1970s we still drive cars powered by gasoline, and use refrigerators and TVs; they're just incrementally improved but not radically different in concept. Now they're made elsewhere in the world by newly industrialised economies which have imitated the industrial practices of the US and Europe, and are imported rather than home-produced. The newer technologies like the internet and cell phones are for communications, and don't need a lot of workers to run them.

The author goes on to analyse the incremental value of increasing spend on education, which he sees as offering diminishing economic returns, and writes an excellent section analysing healthcare spending - again, beyond a certain point doubling spending offers smaller and smaller incremental returns in health benefits.Read more ›
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1.0 out of 5 starsAn American-centric fluff piece
By W. Forbes on 9 Feb. 2012
Format: Hardcover
I was very frustrated by reading this book. It gives a very poor representation of the causes of the 'Great Stagnation', essentially blaming the exhaustion of 'low-hanging fruit' from the American economy and referencing very few other causes. In fact, all it does is repeat 'low-hanging fruit' over and over for tens of pages before coming to an extra-ordinarily brief section on a possible solution. This is the fabled solution hinted at in the Title byline - "How America....will (Eventually) Feel Better."

Perhaps the reason you may be looking at this book is to read of inventive or well thought out ideas on how America (and perhaps the world) will get out of its economic strife. If so, you will be bemused to learn that Cowen's only idea (if you can call it an idea) is to value scientists more. That is it. No thoughts on deleveraging, rebalancing economies, increasing education standards, better regulation of banking (and the like), no thoughts how the political situation in America allowed such a housing bubble and a moral-hazard bailing out of the banks. Instead, we should value scientists more. This is a worthy goal, but not a solution, and certainly not one that merits the grandiose reference in the book's title.

If you are looking for a well thought out, well researched and well written book on the causes and solutions to the World's ills, do not buy this book, at any price.

Another review of the book by Howard Davies , the former head of the FSA (British banking regulator) is worth a read. His conclusion: "So, Cowen has clearly described an interesting phenomenon, advanced a partial explanation of it, and identified a frankly daft solution. "
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5.0 out of 5 starsExcellent and provocative view of the future of the West's economies
By Paul Bowes TOP 1000 REVIEWER on 30 May 2011
Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
'The Great Stagnation' is a short, incisive disquisition, primarily from a North American perspective, on the macroeconomic historical origins of our current situation. Tyler Cowen - a highly influential American academic economist and columnist - doesn't so much disagree with other analysts of our recent troubles as propose that behind the specific problems they identify - such as perverse incentives for bankers - there are deeper ills at work that short-term fixes - such as better banking regulation - will not address.

Cowen proposes that First World economies are the victims of a slowing in the rate of revenue-producing innovation, against a background of the exhaustion of the most easily-exploitable ('free') resources dating from the early '70s. He marshals evidence to show that the extremely rapid rise in standards of living in the developed economies from the Industrial Revolution until shortly after the Second World War were the product of an unrepeatable combination of factors.

From an American perspective, he isolates three factors in particular: free land; significant technological breakthroughs; and a large body of educable, and previously uneducated youth. By the 1960s at the latest, he suggests, there were already clear signs that these 'low-hanging fruit' had been plucked. Cowen argues that electorates and politicians alike had by then become accustomed to rapid rates of growth - and thus rising personal wealth - as facts of nature. When growth rates began to fall as technological innovation slowed and spending on government activities rose, political left and right alike were disconcerted.Read more ›
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