Quotes from Robert J. Gordon

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside. —Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine

advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970,

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

Chief among these headwinds is the rise of inequality that since 1970 has steadily directed an ever larger share of the fruits of the American growth machine to the top of the income distribution.

Hearst was eager to stoke the flames of conflict between Spain and the United States over Cuba and sent Frederick Remington the photographer, who could find no signs of war. In a famous exchange of cables, Hearst responded to Remington, "You provide the pictures; I'll provide the war."10

This paradox is resolved when we recognize that advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our

But the cable cars did not last long. They had disappeared from the streets of most cities by 1900 and from Chicago by 1906, and they remain to this day only in the single city of San Francisco, where they are primarily a tourist attraction.

Morris Kleiner has calculated that the percentage of jobs subject to occupational licensing has expanded from 10 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 2008.

The event happened at noon on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. That moment was a pivotal episode in world history as Leland Stanford pounded a golden spike with a silver hammer and in an instant ended the isolation of California and the Great West from the eastern half of the United States.

Compared to Canada, Japan, or any nation in western Europe, the United States combines by far the most expensive system with the shortest life expectancy.

The new element in part III is the headwinds—inequality, education, demography, and debt repayment—that are buffeting the U.S. economy and pushing down the growth rate of the real disposable income of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution to little above zero.

If the stock market continues to advance, we know that inequality will increase, for capital gains on equities accrue disproportionately to the top income brackets.

The combined effects of growing inequality, a faltering education system, demographic headwinds, and the strong likelihood of a fiscal correction imply that the real median disposable income will grow much more slowly in the future than in the past.

Inequality can be alleviated and productivity growth promoted by combating overly zealous and regressive regulations

The post-2020 fiscal reckoning does not require higher payroll taxes or lower retirement benefits, as new sources of fiscal revenue are available from drug legalization, increased tax progressivity, tax reform that eliminates most tax deductions, and a carbon tax that provides incentives to reduce emissions.

Unlike IR #2, the digital revolution IR #3 had a less powerful overall effect on productivity growth, and the main effect of its inventions occurred in the relatively short interval of 1996 to 2004, when the invention of the Internet, web browsers, search engines, and e-commerce created a fundamental change in business practices and procedures that was reflected in a temporary revival of productivity growth.

The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.

Our central thesis is that some inventions are more important than others, and that the revolutionary century after the Civil War was made possible by a unique clustering, in the late nineteenth century, of what we will call the "Great Inventions.

Although advertising began in the late nineteenth century with the development of the first branded products, its true explosion came in the 1920s, when it became increasingly tied to the newly invented radio.

See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call, Drive your Chevrolet through the USA, America's the greatest land of all. [ Quoting The Dinah Shore Chevy Show theme song, c. 1952, in an epigraph to Chapter 11: See the USA in Your Chevrolet or from a Plane Flying High Above. ]

Throughout American economic life, regulatory barriers to entry and competition limit innovation by providing excessive monopoly privileges through copyright and patent laws, restrict occupational choice by protecting incumbent service providers through occupational licensing restrictions, and create artificial scarcity through land-use regulation. They contribute to increased inequality while reducing productivity growth.

both the Great Depression and World War II directly contributed to the Great Leap.

Pioneers in the development of particular products and industries have been described by Schumpeter as "innovators," those "individuals who are daring, speculative, restless, imaginative and, more pertinently, eager to exploit new inventions.

Electric light, the first reliable internal combustion engine, and wireless transmission were all invented within the same three-month period at the end of 1879. Within