With such an intellectually bankrupt start, and remember, this is a framing device meant to set your opinion on a guided track, what could we actually expect to get from this article?
Robert J. Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University who
has patiently developed the proposition in a series of research papers
over the last few years, has bundled his arguments into an ambitious new
book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” (Princeton University Press).
“If you are sitting in Silicon Valley, rich and at the frontier of
technology,” said Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard, “it is probably true
that things are getting better.”
The same can’t always be said for the rest of us.
The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributedThis is all too common with the NY Times.
As for the argument in the article, which I see online with a title "America’s Best Days May Be Behind It" and a still image from the The Dick Van Dyke Show, I think the best part of the article's argument is the yeah-but part, where optimism is expressed.
"What Professor Gordon fails to account for, Professor Mokyr argues, is that the information technology revolution and other recent developments produced mind-blowing tools and techniques, from gene-sequencing machines to computers that analyze mountains of data at blistering speed. This is creating vast new opportunities for innovation, from health care to materials technology and beyond.
'The tools available to science have been improving at a dazzling rate,' he told me. 'I’m not sure how, but the world of technology in 30 to 40 years’ time will be vastly different than it is today.'"
I am older than most participants on Hacker News. My family is plainly better off than my parents' family, even though we have fewer total hours of labor force participation per year than my parents jointly had, with the same number of children (four). I can remember a LOT of predictions from my youth that the world would go to hell by the time I was a young adult. It hasn't happened. Prosperity and healthy lifespan and levels of education are rising all over the world. Yeah, the world is still full of problems, but our supply of problem-solving tools and our scope of choice about what problems to solve when is better than ever.