Must-read: Izabella Kaminska: “Bob Gordon’s Not Getting in Your Driverless Car”

Must-Read: Izabella Kaminska: Bob Gordon’s Not Getting in Your Driverless Car: “Reading Coyle’s review it’s clear Gordon uses the book to expand in more detail…

…on some of the ideas presented in his October 2015 paper “Secular Stagnation on the Supply Side: U.S. Productivity Growth in the Long Run”… that the days of miracle growth are long gone and that slower growth lies ahead…. There is something different about information-fuelled growth compared to technique-fuelled growth. The former’s advantage for some reason stales more quickly than the latter’s…. Think of it this way: when you had a Blackberry and nobody else did, the competitive advantage associated with having that blackberry felt incredibly beneficial to you. Now that everyone has a smartphone, however, that advantage (namely, being able to work on the go, at home or from your bed) has diminished entirely. What was once an information advantage has in some cases become an information burden because people’s expectations about when, how and where it is appropriate to work have changed entirely…. Fundamentally, Gordon’s core point doesn’t seem to rest on whether we’ve stopped innovating or not, but rather whether innovation is happening fast enough to counter the diminishing returns of past innovation as well as to create entirely new types of returns.