Must-Read: Artir: No Great Technological Stagnation

Must-Read: Artir: No Great Technological Stagnation: “Some people many economists say we are living through a Great Stagnation…

…I take an engineering perspective and look directly at technology itself. For some reason, no one has done what I will do in this post. Surely productivity is important, but since technology is supposed to be a substantial component of TFP, someone should have looked into precisely that. Shame upon the World’s Blogosphere! My point here is that, by the measures we have, there is no stagnation. I leave it to someone else to solve the puzzle of why TFP growth is low while technological growth is constant. Let’s begin with some charts. Here (Nagy et al. 2011), you have long run trends for several Information Technologies and different curve fittings for them. In the paper they explain which one is the best one. Hint: not the exponential!…