Rarely can two economists of such eminence have been made to look foolish so quickly. In 2015, Robert J. Gordon wrote a book proclaiming that the lousy productivity growth that we had seen in recent years was the best we could expect, and in January 2016 Paul Krugman reviewed it enthusiastically in the New York Times. Within two years, it is becoming increasingly clear: productivity is rebounding to historic levels, its malaise having been due to the misguided economic policies Krugman and Gordon favored, and its recovery at least partly due to the policies of a President both men regard with unmitigated and unprecedented loathing. Cheerful, hysterical laughter is the only possible response, together with an iron determination not to let either man near the levers of economic power again.

I reviewed Gordon's original article in the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2012. Even at that stage, when the u.s. productivity malaise had only recently become acute, Gordon's theory seemed to me unlikely to be correct. More resources were being devoted to research than at any previous time, and the pace of intellectual advance seemed likely to have been accelerated by the entry of Chinese and Indian researchers into the global conversation. It thus seemed very unlikely to me that the pace of innovation would have slowed to a crawl through natural means, and even less likely that the slowing would, as Gordon claimed, mark the beginning of a productivity growth dearth that would last for the rest of the 21st Century.

Over the next four years, the productivity growth malaise intensified, increasing the fashion for Gordon's theory. With nearly a decade of feeble productivity growth behind us in 2016, it really did seem possible that the industrialized world had reached a state of sclerosis, in which further productivity gains would be minimal. Poorer countries would catch up, by adapting the techniques of the rich world, but the “frontier” of human achievement and living standards would remain static. Add to that an intensification of inequality, as Thomas Piketty postulated, and the future looked dreary indeed for all but the fortunate top 1%. Then, as Krugman noisily maintained, the only hope for human advancement would be ever more extravagant programs of government waste and income redistribution.