{"id":3157,"date":"2011-01-30T14:28:48","date_gmt":"2011-01-30T18:28:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=3157"},"modified":"2011-01-30T14:28:48","modified_gmt":"2011-01-30T18:28:48","slug":"tyler-cowen-and-goldinkatz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=3157","title":{"rendered":"Tyler Cowen and Goldin\/Katz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At least briefly today, Paul Krugman turned into a&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com\/2011\/01\/30\/the-kitchen-test\/\">social historian talking about kitchens and mundane life changes<\/a>. I&#39;d call him out for encroaching on my territory except that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.historians.org\/info\/aha_history\/clbecker.htm\">Carl Becker would call baloney<\/a> on me, and I agree with the gist of Krugman&#39;s point, which echoes <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/01\/30\/business\/30view.html\">Tyler Cowen&#39;s<\/a>: recent results on productivity and incomes for most Americans have been tepid for a while. Cowen&#39;s column is essentially a riff on a new e-book he published through Amazon, <em>The Great Stagnation<\/em>, and the moral of the story is close to the end: &quot;Until science has a greater impact again on average daily living standards, the political problem will be in learning to live within our means.&quot; When will that happen? As the great social observer Yogi Berra said once, predictions are tough, especially about the future.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The tricky part is not the general observation about rate of change with fundamental human conditions but the underlying dynamics. Cowen&#39;s point is somewhat at odds with the argument of Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz in <em>The Race Between Education and Technology<\/em>. Cowen argues that income stagnation is a feature of a decline in productivity growth. Goldin and Katz say that technology-work trends have been fairly steady but we just haven&#39;t expanded education as much as in the first half of the twentieth century. Krugman doesn&#39;t address Goldin and Katz explicitly, but he sides with Cowen in terms of everyday life; the ability to use an iPad may seem like seven or eight steps above my first computer, a Leading Edge XT purchased in 1987, but that&#39;s a relatively small change compared to the fact that I grew up in a house with indoor plumbing and electricity that powered lights and refrigeration, something that was rare in my grandparents&#39; and great-grandparents&#39; childhood.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>But&#8230; and here&#39;s an important but: the great changes in the first half of the twentieth century were about the organization of industrial life and infrastructure far more than they were about the development of science. The construction of separate potable water and sewage systems is civil engineering, not nuclear physics. Same with the building of a national electric grid; the Rural Electrification Administration of the 1930s was a political rather than a scientific advance. All influences of basic science on your and my life are mediated by a range of factors, and infrastructure and commercial developments are always blends of technical expertise and other things.&nbsp;(Thus, basic research is a public good far more than it is a private good and requires public investment.)&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I will be very curious to see if Goldin and Katz respond to Cowen and how&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At least briefly today, Paul Krugman turned into a&nbsp;social historian talking about kitchens and mundane life changes. I&#39;d call him out for encroaching on my territory except that Carl Becker would call baloney on me, and I agree with the gist of Krugman&#39;s point, which echoes Tyler Cowen&#39;s: recent results on productivity and incomes for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-OV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3157"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3159,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3157\/revisions\/3159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}