In a post a few days ago I made a distinction between looking at “measured growth over a few decades” and “the long-run growth rate of GDP”. The point was that while we can calculate the former, the latter is something that we have to be more speculative about.

As part of that post, I dropped in a comment about Robert Gordon’s work on the long-run growth rate of GDP. I said “He also argues that g will fall due to us running out of useful things to innovate on”, where “g” is the growth rate of output per worker. That is a far too glib characterization of Gordon’s work. So, first, my apologies to Bob for an unfair comment.

So what *does* Bob say about future growth? He’s got several recent working papers out on the subject that you can read to get his full story. See here,