The Great Stagnation

What Hacker News says

1. jseligerNov 2018
   This is a fine thing to do with $1.8B and that amount could be used in worse ways. Still:

   Together, the federal and state governments should make a new commitment to improving access to college and reducing the often prohibitive burdens debt places on so many students and families.

   There may be no better investment that we can make in the future of the American dream — and the promise of equal opportunity for all.

   At the moment, zero incentivizes colleges to reduce costs. If they can get a student in the door, the federal government will ensure that student loans are available and that the college gets paid no matter what happens to the student. Regulators, in the meantime, work hard to ensure that colleges and especially universities face little competition.

   So we get an array of problems: we are all, in a way, paying for the party: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz.... Already prestigious schools like Hopkins compete primarily to raise their own prestige, rather than improve access. Why do most such schools admit fewer students per capita than they did in 1950? Why are they so interested in discriminatory children-of-alumni admissions?

   While I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth, I've been involved in post-secondary education for too long, and read too many books on it (Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation is recommended, as is his book The Complacent Class), to think that "more money, same system" is the answer. We need comprehensive, systemic reform, starting with the accreditation bodies, before we pour more money in.

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2. jseligerAug 2016
   Tyler Cowen discusses precisely these issues in The Great Stagnation: http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-America-Low-Hanging-E..., which was published in 2010 or 2011 but is still excellent.
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3. jseligerFeb 2015
   * Until about 1900 or so, 80-90% of the workforce made stuff - agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and construction. That number went below 50% some time after WWII. It's continued to drop. Today, it's 16% in the US.[1] Yet US manufacturing output is higher than ever.*

   I find this point interesting and wonder about it sometimes: does making a movie count as "stuff?" An operating system? A novel? I can see good arguments for both sides and am not asking the question antagonistically. Even among things that unambiguously "stuff"—like cars—much of their value now comes in the form of software.

   The real issue may be Baumol's Cost Disease. Stuff is cheaper because of efficiency but services (teaching, doctoring) is very expensive because it isn't. Tyler Cowen discusses extensively the hard-to-automate areas in The Great Stagnation, which is worth reading.

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4. jeffreyrogersSep 2014
   Thiel is more or less reiterating the points that the economist Tyler Cowen has been making for several years. I just read Zero to One and found it good, but not great. Cowen's book, Average is Over [1], covers much of the same ideas and is better reasoned. (Cowen's earlier book, The Great Stagnation, is also quite good).

   [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1

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5. jseligerFeb 2014
   My question is, what is the problem, really

   Take a look at Matt Yglesias's The Rent Is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO); many "fun" municipalities like Seattle have restricted development to the point that housing is extremely expensive. If you move from Seattle to, say, Houston or Dallas, you'll probably see your effective rent shrink by 35 – 50%.

   Secondly: see Tyler Cowen's books The Great Stagnation and Average is Over. Those books are too sophisticated and deep (though they're quite readable) to summarize here, but the shortish version is that Western economies are undergoing a lot of profound shifts driven by a combination of technology and Baumol's cost disease.

   in the last couple years have been rent, medical, and dental in that order

   Alex Tabarrok's Launching the Innovation Renaissance is also good: regarding medicine and dentistry, part of the issue is Baumol's Cost Disease and part of it is the powerful lobbies that restrict entry into those fields through licensing regimes and other means.

   Finally, a general note: be wary of any answers in this thread that don't cite any sources and ideally those sources should be books. The issue is too complex for simple answers, and the simple answers that one tends to hear also tend to be wrong or missing a lot of important information.

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6. kungfooeyJun 2013
   I'm rather surprised this hasn't already been mentioned, but if you want to read more on this thread of thought written by an economist, check out the ebook, "The Great Stagnation" by Tyler Cowen. Alternatively, watch his Tedx talk.
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