The Rise and Fall of American Growth review

Robert Gordon's argument is one of the most carefully constructed and most contested in recent economics: that the period from 1870 to 1970 was a singular century of transformative invention, and that we have been living with the deceleration ever since. The innovations of that century — indoor plumbing, electricity, the internal combustion engine, antibiotics, telecommunications — fundamentally changed what daily life was like for ordinary Americans. The productivity gains from those inventions were massive and one-time, not repeatable. Gordon argues that digital technology, for all its genuine achievements, has produced a narrower improvement in human life than the great inventions it followed.

The first two-thirds of the book is essentially a rich social and economic history of American life from the Civil War to the 1970s. Gordon documents in granular detail what it meant to live before electricity, before running water, before antibiotics, before refrigeration. A woman doing laundry in 1870 spent roughly eight hours on the task; by 1950, an electric washer reduced that to an hour. The gain was transformative in a way that the shift from a smartphone to a better smartphone simply isn't. Gordon accumulates dozens of such comparisons across every domain of life — health, transportation, communication, food, housing — to build his case that the century 1870–1970 was genuinely unprecedented in human history.