Robert J. Gordon > Quotes

“If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost $100 and get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year killing everyone inside. —Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970,”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Chief among these headwinds is the rise of inequality that since 1970 has steadily directed an ever larger share of the fruits of the American growth machine to the top of the income distribution.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“If the stock market continues to advance, we know that inequality will increase, for capital gains on equities accrue disproportionately to the top income brackets.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“The post-2020 fiscal reckoning does not require higher payroll taxes or lower retirement benefits, as new sources of fiscal revenue are available from drug legalization, increased tax progressivity, tax reform that eliminates most tax deductions, and a carbon tax that provides incentives to reduce emissions.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“But the cable cars did not last long. They had disappeared from the streets of most cities by 1900 and from Chicago by 1906, and they remain to this day only in the single city of San Francisco, where they are primarily a tourist attraction.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“This paradox is resolved when we recognize that advances since 1970 have tended to be channeled into a narrow sphere of human activity having to do with entertainment, communications, and the collection and processing of information. For the rest of what humans care about—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, health, and working conditions both inside and outside the home—progress slowed down after 1970, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Morris Kleiner has calculated that the percentage of jobs subject to occupational licensing has expanded from 10 percent in 1970 to 30 percent in 2008.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“The new element in part III is the headwinds—inequality, education, demography, and debt repayment—that are buffeting the U.S. economy and pushing down the growth rate of the real disposable income of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution to little above zero.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Inequality can be alleviated and productivity growth promoted by combating overly zealous and regressive regulations”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Hearst was eager to stoke the flames of conflict between Spain and the United States over Cuba and sent Frederick Remington the photographer, who could find no signs of war. In a famous exchange of cables, Hearst responded to Remington, “You provide the pictures; I’ll provide the war.”10”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“The combined effects of growing inequality, a faltering education system, demographic headwinds, and the strong likelihood of a fiscal correction imply that the real median disposable income will grow much more slowly in the future than in the past.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Unlike IR #2, the digital revolution IR #3 had a less powerful overall effect on productivity growth, and the main effect of its inventions occurred in the relatively short interval of 1996 to 2004, when the invention of the Internet, web browsers, search engines, and e-commerce created a fundamental change in business practices and procedures that was reflected in a temporary revival of productivity growth.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“For instance, the degree of enjoyment provided by an hour of leisure spent watching a TV set in 1955 is greater than that provided by an hour listening to the radio in the same living room in 1935.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Compared to Canada, Japan, or any nation in western Europe, the United States combines by far the most expensive system with the shortest life expectancy.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“The event happened at noon on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. That moment was a pivotal episode in world history as Leland Stanford pounded a golden spike with a silver hammer and in an instant ended the isolation of California and the Great West from the eastern half of the United States.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“GDP omits many dimensions of the quality of life that matter to people.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture—but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level…. Then—just a couple of hundred years ago—people started getting richer. And richer and richer still.2”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Both the immigration legislation and the draconian regime of high tariffs (the Ford–McCumber tariff of 1922 and the Smoot–Hawley tariff of 1930) converted the U.S. into a relatively closed economy during the three decades between 1930 and 1960. The lack of competition for jobs from recent immigrants made it easier for unions to organize and push up wages in the 1930s. The high tariff wall allowed American manufacturing to introduce all available innovations into U.S.-based factories without the outsourcing that has become common in the last several decades. The lack of competition from immigrants and imports boosted the wages of workers at the bottom and contributed to the remarkable “great compression” of the income distribution during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.36 Thus the closing of the American economy through restrictive immigration legislation and high tariffs may indirectly have contributed to the rise of real wages in the 1930s, the focus of innovative investment in the domestic economy, and the general reduction of inequality from the 1920s to the 1950s.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“In any case, it is clear that the phenomenon of retirement for males aged 65 or older began long before the New Deal’s invention of Social Security.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“teaches us that the invention of new services has been, if anything, more important than the invention of new goods.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“The interstate highway system in its comprehensiveness was a belated attempt to duplicate not the Pennsylvania Turnpike but the German autobahn network over a spatial terrain roughly twenty times larger.23”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“The most important unmeasured benefit of all, the extension of life expectancy, occurred much more rapidly from 1890 to 1950 than afterward.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Our central thesis is that some inventions are more important than others, and that the revolutionary century after the Civil War was made possible by a unique clustering, in the late nineteenth century, of what we will call the “Great Inventions.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Between 1940 and 1970, output per person and output per hour continued to increase rapidly, in part as a result of three of the most important subsidiary spinoffs of IR #2—air conditioning, the interstate highway system, and commercial air transport—while the world of personal entertainment was forever altered by television.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call, Drive your Chevrolet through the USA, America’s the greatest land of all.

[Quoting The Dinah Shore Chevy Show theme song, c. 1952, in an epigraph to Chapter 11: See the USA in Your Chevrolet or from a Plane Flying High Above.]”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“Less speculative is the productivity-enhancing learning by doing that occurred during the high-pressure economy of World War II. Economists have long studied the steady improvement over time in the speed and efficiency with which Liberty freighter ships were built. The most remarkable aspect of the surge in labor productivity during World War II is that it appears to have been permanent; despite the swift reduction in wartime defense spending during 1945–47, labor productivity did not decline at all during the immediate postwar years. The necessity of war became the mother of invention of improved production techniques, and these innovations, large and small, were not forgotten after the war.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War

“This encouragement by the federal government pushed the frontier westward into Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. But only about 40 percent of these claims were finalized. “Drought, insect plagues, low [farm] prices, and isolation caused thousands of farm sites to be abandoned.”
― Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War