The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War is a really interesting book, especially if you are the sort of person who wants to believe in maximum technological abundance. If your instinct is to think that we should be able to go from something like $60,000 or $70,000 GDP per capita to $500,000 GDP per capita, this book is basically here to say: probably not.

From a progress-studies perspective, Gordon’s argument is that the American economic story, and really the broader story of technological growth, looks like an S-curve. The easy gains were picked early. They were picked in the decades after the Civil War and into the decades after World War II. That was the period when the major inventions arrived and when the big transformations of daily life took hold: indoor plumbing, electrification, home appliances, and all the other changes that fundamentally altered how people lived.

His claim is that later technological revolutions, like the internet or even smartphones, are not capable of producing the same kind of economic transformation. They matter, but they do not matter in quite the same way as universal electricity or sanitation.

That said, the book is now somewhat dated, because we are living in a moment when artificial intelligence may end up growing the economy in ways that Gordon did not fully anticipate. AI may allow us to automate kinds of labor that previously seemed impossible to automate, and that is before even getting into the possible impact of robotics. So it remains to be seen whether we are about to witness not just the rise and fall, but the rise, fall, and rise of American growth.

One caveat I have is that the book is very American-centric. As I keep reading other American history books, including Ages of American Capitalism, I am less sure how much America alone should be treated as the main driver of technological discovery and technological exploitation. Gordon does briefly discuss the Atlantic economy, but he does not emphasize as much as some other historians do that the American economy was, in many respects, subordinate to the British economy until well into the twentieth century. That does not make the book wrong, but it is an important note.