Endless economic growth, culminating in the world’s highest living standards, is part of the way that America—meaning “the United States of America”—sees itself. The phrase “the American dream” is hackneyed, but even the one word “America” can become a metaphor of desirability and longing. In Jacques Brel’s 1962 song, Madeleine was the alluring but difficult to attain girlfriend who was “mon Amérique à moi.” The first generation of Europeans after the Second World War yearned for America almost as a distant vision, although there was only the Atlantic between their shattered continent and its real-world embodiment of economic dynamism and success.
One thesis of Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth is that the United States did indeed enjoy a period of exceptional growth, between 1920 and 1970, that transformed living standards for the better. In these five decades, output per hour rose by just over 2.8 percent a year, enabling people simultaneously to improve their material circumstances and to enjoy more leisure. (Because of compound interest, productivity growth of 2.8 percent a year results over fifty years in a quadrupling of a worker’s output.) But Gordon also identifies subsequent deceleration and relative failure. In the forty-four years to 2014 output per hour went up at the much slower rate of 1.6 percent. The last decade, blighted by the Great Recession of 2008