The Rise and Fall of American Growth

“When electricity made it possible to create light with the flick of a switch instead of the strike of a match, the process of creating light was changed forever.”

About this book

The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) is Robert J. Gordon’s landmark account of the U.S. standard of living since the Civil War, published by Princeton University Press in a volume of roughly 780 pages. Gordon, a Northwestern University macroeconomist and economic historian long known for skepticism toward Silicon Valley triumphalism, argues that 1870 to 1970 formed a special century. In that hundred years, electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine, and modern communication remade everyday American life at a breadth unmatched before or since. Indoor plumbing, electric light, cars, cleaner water, and longer lives were not lifestyle upgrades at the margin; they were civilizational resets that also show up as exceptionally strong productivity growth, especially in the midcentury decades. After 1970, information and communication technology dazzled consumers and briefly lifted productivity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, yet Gordon contends its economic width was narrower than the second industrial revolution’s great inventions. Entertainment, communication, and information processing changed faster than food, clothing, housing, and many workplace fundamentals. Looking ahead, he stacks headwinds from rising inequality, slowing educational advance, population aging, and fiscal pressure, and concludes that most Americans may not again enjoy the parent-to-child living-standard leap that midcentury families took for granted. The book’s distinctive method is to braid kitchen-table living history with macroeconomic measurement: chapters walk food, housing, transport, health, work, and media across two eras before turning to sources of acceleration and deceleration. Chinese readers know the CITIC Press translation 美国增长的起落 (2018). Praise from outlets such as the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, and the New York Review of Books has focused on the historical achievement even where reviewers contest the forecast. Read it if you want a cold ruler against techno-hype, a vivid map of how modern daily life was built, and a serious framework for separating catch-up diffusion from frontier miracles. It is not a pep talk, not a short primer, and not a claim that invention has stopped—only that another special century is hard to schedule.