American Enterprise Institute Web Event — Is the 'Great Stagnation' Over? Introduction: James Pethokoukis, Dewitt Wallace
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American Enterprise Institute Web event — Is the ‘great stagnation’ over? Introduction: James Pethokoukis, DeWitt Wallace Fellow, AEI 2:05 PM Discussion Panelists: Tyler Cowen, Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics, George Mason University Michael R. Strain, Director, Economic Policy Studies, AEI Catherine Tucker, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dietrich Vollrath, Professor and Chair of Economics, University of Houston Moderator: James Pethokoukis, DeWitt Wallace Fellow, AEI Tuesday, April 6, 2021 2:00–3:00 p.m. Event page: https://www.aei.org/events/is-the-great-stagnation-over/ James Pethokoukis: Hi, I’m Jim Pethokoukis, and welcome to today’s AEI event, “Is the ‘great stagnation’ over?” Since the early 1970s, Americans have seen disappointing levels of economic growth, productivity growth, and apparently technological progress, at least compared to the immediate postwar decades. However, there seem to be new reasons for optimism. As the COVID-19 pandemic begins to recede, short-term economic projections are extremely optimistic. And 2020 was an impressive year for technological progress, featuring rapid vaccine innovation, the use of AI for discovering new antibiotics, positive developments regarding nuclear fusion, and a new age of human spaceflight for the United States. The media are also starting to catch on. A few recent headlines: The New York Times, “The coming technology boom”; from Bloomberg, “The 1920s roared after a pandemic, and the 2020s will try”; from The Economist, “Why a dawn of technological optimism is breaking”; and from The Financial Times, “Goodbye virus-ridden 2020, hello roaring twenties.” So, is the great stagnation really over? And if so, what does that mean? To try and answer these questions, I’ll be chatting with a really great panel. Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris chair of economics at George Mason University, and he serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. He’s the author of several books, including 2011’s “The Great Stagnation.” Catherine Tucker is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management Science and Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan School of Management. She’s also the cofounder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab and co-organizer of the Economics of Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Dietrich Vollrath is professor of economics and chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Houston. He is also the author of “Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success,” released last April. And finally, Michael Strain is director of Economic Policy Studies here at AEI, as well as the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy. And he’s the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It),” released last year. One thing finally, before we begin: We’ll be doing a Q&A at the end of this event. So please, please, submit your questions as soon as possible on Twitter with the #AskAEIEcon, that’s AskAEIEcon. You can also submit a question via email by contacting the email address listed in the event description. So, to begin, I’m going to start with Tyler, since you wrote a book called “The Great Stagnation” and a big reason why I’m probably doing this panel, it’s been 10 years since you published that book. What was your argument at the time about the great stagnation and why we were stagnating? Tyler Cowen: At the time, I suggested that our previous technologies had in some regards run their course. So, if you take powerful machines and fossil fuels and put them together as a kind of general-purpose technology, we did everything we could with that. So, we invented cars and then everyone, almost everyone had a car. And then cars got better, but along some origins, cars just didn’t get all that much better. I think the odds are we are today on the cusp of another revolution based on new general-purpose technologies, which I would define as some mix of internet, computers, and computational power. So, in 2011 when I published the book, I thought the great stagnation would end within the next 20 years, and odds are that’s what we’re seeing today is the great stagnation ending. James Pethokoukis: And this is for anyone who wants to jump in: Is there a general consensus for — what period are we talking about? Are we talking since the early ’70s? Are we talking really since the end of the internet boom? First of all, when we talk about stagnation, are both of those applicable? And do we have a good reason why they happened to begin with? Tyler gave one set of reasons, is that the general consensus? Michael R. Strain: Well, can I just key off Tyler’s comment about the time period we have to look forward to? I am very confident in my view that the great stagnation, such as it was, is not permanent. There is a whole lot of innovation happening, new technologies being created. And it’s true that we haven’t found the best uses for all of those new technologies and all of those new inventions, but I’m very confident that at some point we will. So, that’s what I mean when I say I don’t think stagnation is a permanent condition. But whether or not we figure out how to use all this great new innovation in the next three years, five years, 10 years, you know, there I’m feeling less confident about any prediction that I might make. And so, I think Tyler actually framed it well. You know, at some point in the next 20 years, this is going to end, we’re about halfway through that period, I guess I would agree with that. I’d be surprised if we woke up in the year 2031 and hadn’t figured out how to use a lot of this new technology. And in fact, we just saw a great use of some new technology and a great use in coronavirus vaccines and that’ll have a huge impact on productivity. But whether or not this happens in 2023 or 2025 or 2027, I think when you start getting to that level of granularity, it becomes harder and harder to make predictions. James Pethokoukis: Is the reason for this — and I ask this to Catherine — is the reason for this confidence, do you think, mostly because that’s kind of how it’s always worked before? We’ve come up with great new ideas — took a little while to figure out how to use them, how to spread throughout the economy, eventually, they made big differences. Are we just kind of assuming that these new technologies are just kind of like the ones in the past and we’ll have that eventual impact, whether it’s next year or 10 years from now? Catherine Tucker: Now, this is such a wonderful question. So, I’m something which is called a “digital economist,” and we’ve spent the last 20–25 years trying to excuse why it is that all the technologies we studied have been everywhere apart from the productivity figures. And we’ve got two major explanations. One is that we’re just not measuring it right. Google Maps appear nowhere in the productivity figures. Google Maps are just wonderful, right? And we’re just missing out on these innovations. And then if people aren’t convinced by that argument, we then say, “But look at electricity, look at steam.” It’s just natural the trajectory of general-purpose technology, you expect 20–30 years of really what we’re going to call “constant experimentation” before it appears in the productivity figures. So, I think that aligns with a lot of what the panel is saying. Dietrich Vollrath: Yeah, I agree, I think Catherine really hit that correctly in the sense that I think if you look historically, most of these big events, or if you think of these central general-purpose technologies, we think of them as arising immediately and the moment electricity came around, everything changed. But that was a decades-long event, I mean, to the point that, you know, I mean, we were electrifying rural America into the ’40s and ’50s and even into the ’60s. These are decade-long changes. So the fact that we haven’t seen massive productivity growth out of computing, say, or the internet doesn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t come. And as Tyler was mentioning, it may just be that we’re finally to the point where we really figured out how to use it, right? It’s been experimenting. Catherine Tucker: Yes. I mean, the way I’ve always liked as a technology economist to think about it is we thought that the light bulb — we thought that electricity was initially about the light bulb and about illumination, and the productivity impact of that wasn’t amazing. On the other hand, putting electricity into factories, that is a real productivity revolution. So I think so much of, you know, what you’re calling the experimentation period, we don’t even — for 20 years, maybe we’ve just been using the technologies for things which aren’t showing up in the productivity figures. Michael R. Strain: And Jim, to answer your question more directly, I agree with all that. My optimism is not driven by some sort of kind of vague, “This is how it’s always happened in the past.” I mean, if you look at specific technologies, you know, we’re getting much better at batteries, we’re getting much better at therapies like vaccines, we’re getting much better at artificial intelligence, you can go onto YouTube and find videos of driverless trucks going down the highway.