Northwestern University Colleagues Have Opposing Views of 21st Century Economy
Economic odd couple Robert Gordon, left, and Joel Mokyr encapsulate the debate on the future of innovation.
Rob Hart for The Wall Street Journal
EVANSTON, Ill.— Robert Gordon, a curmudgeonly 73-year-old economist, believes our best days are over. After a century of life-changing innovations that spurred growth, he says, human progress is slowing to a crawl.
Joel Mokyr, a cheerful 67-year-old economist, imagines a coming age of new inventions, including gene therapies to prolong our life span and miracle seeds that can feed the world without fertilizers.These big-name colleagues at Northwestern University represent opposite poles in the debate over the future of the 21st century economy: rapid innovation driven by robotic manufacturing, 3-D printing and cloud computing, versus years of job losses, stagnant wages and rising income inequality.The divergent views are more than academic. For many Americans, the recession left behind the scars of lost jobs, lower wages and depressed home prices. The question is whether tough times are here for good. The answer depends on who you ask."I think the rate of innovation is just getting faster and faster," Mr. Mokyr said over noodles and spicy chicken at a Thai restaurant near the campus where he and Mr. Gordon have taught for four decades."What's the evidence of that?" snapped Mr. Gordon. "There isn't any."The men get along fine when talk is limited to, say, faculty gossip. About the future, though, they bicker constantly. When Mr. Mokyr described life-prolonging medical advances, Mr. Gordon cut in: "Extending life without curing Alzheimer's means people who can walk but can't think."Mr. Gordon landed at Northwestern from the University of Chicago in the fall of 1973, a year before Mr. Mokyr arrived there from Yale after finishing his Ph.D. Their tit-for-tat repartee makes them popular speakers—for economists, at least. Mr. Gordon recently began charging as much as $20,000 for U.S. appearances—a fee, he said, dictated by his new booking agent.Even there, the men are at odds. "I am a rank-and-file academic, not a basketball star," Mr. Mokyr said. "I have neither a literary agent nor a speaker bureau. I charge what they pay me. If it's not enough I don't go."
The professors headlined a Bank of Korea event in Seoul earlier this month. "We always go mano-a-mano," Mr. Mokyr said. "But we often end up talking about different things. Bob's a macroeconomist, I'm an economic historian."Mr. Mokyr has long studied how new tools have led to economic breakthroughs. For example, how the development of telescopes allowed for rapid advances in astronomy. History makes him certain his colleague is wrong.Mr. Gordon's ideas, in fact, fly in the face of modern economic orthodoxy. Since Nobel economist Robert Solow first argued in the 1950s that growth was driven by new technology, most economists have embraced the idea. Progress may be uneven, according to this view, but there is no reason to expect the world to run out of ideas."Bob says the low-hanging fruit has been picked, because we won't invent indoor plumbing again," Mr. Mokyr said. In speeches, Mr. Gordon often displays images of a flush toilet and iPhone and asks: Which would you give up?Mr. Mokyr said many economists before Mr. Gordon have proclaimed the end of progress, but these pessimists have always been proven wrong. It was a popular theme during the Depression, he said, but modern economists now recognize the 1930s as a period of rapid technological progress with such advances as the development of jet engines and radar.Today, Mr. Mokyr said, fast computing is a new tool that will open the way to new inventions in the future....MUCH MORE
HT: the WSJ's Real Time Economics who also have a chart I've not seen before:
