NEW YORK – It has become impossible to deny the so-called secular stagnation gripping the world’s most developed economies: Wealth is piling up, but real wages are barely rising and labor force participation has been on a downward trend. Worse yet, policymakers have no plausible idea about what can be done about it.
Behind this stagnation is the slowdown in productivity growth since 1970. The wellspring of such productivity gains – indigenous innovation – has been badly clogged since the late 1960s (mostly in established industries) and was even more so by 2005.
Image: Edmund S. Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate in economics, is Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University and author of Mass Flourishing.
