#AcademicRunPlaylist - 4/19/25

It was a hot one in Boston today, so it was a good time to break out the bike and listen to a book for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

Today I listened to "The Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth" by Bob Gordon. This book is a methodical review of technological and corresponding social/economic changes in the US since the Civil War, reviewing the impacts of the industrial revolutions and contrasting them to the decline of growth in the US since 1980. Gordon's analysis beyond the detailed accounting of different technological effects, however, is too narrowly focused for my tastes, devoting nearly no space to changes in unionization, tax law, or antitrust relaxation and adopting an extreme techno-deterministic view of development. The refrain that "X can only happen once" is repeated throughout to the point of nearly being a punchline - literally any innovation/social change can only happen once if defined narrowly enough. That being said, the decline of growth is little understood outside economics circles, and this is a good attempt at capturing the problem. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691175805/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth