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HughPickens.com writes:

Take a look back at a popular TV programs from the mid-1960s, say "The Dick Van Dyke Show," and what do you see? Like today, middle-class Americans typically had washing machines and air-conditioning, telephones and cars. The Internet and video games were not yet invented but life, over all, did not look that different. Now flash back 50 years earlier to 1910 and less than half the population lived in cities, Model T's were just starting to roll off the assembly line, most homes weren't wired for electricity, and average life expectancy was only 53. Now Eduardo Porter writes in the NYT that although Americans like to think they live in an era of rapid and unprecedented change, the truth is that the most momentous changes of the 20th century arose between 1920 and 1970 and according to Robert J. Gordon, author of "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," despite the burst of progress of the Internet era, total factor productivity has risen in the last fifty years at only about one-third the pace of the previous five decades. "This book," Gordon writes in the introduction, "ends by doubting that the standard of living of today's youths will double that of their parents, unlike the standard of living of each previous generation of Americans back to the late 19th century."

But that's not the worst part of the story. According to Gordon, the labor force will continue to decline, as aging baby boomers leave the work force and women's labor supply plateaus and gains in education, an important driver of productivity that expanded sharply in the 20th century, will contribute little. Moreover, the growing concentration of income means that whatever the growth rate, most of the population will barely share in its fruits. Altogether, Professor Gordon argues, the disposable income of the bottom 99 percent of the population, which has expanded about 2 percent per year since the late 19th century, will expand over the next few decades at a rate little above zero. Gordon says that the explosion of innovation and prosperity from 1920 through 1970 was a one-time phenomenon.

From now on, progress will continue at the more gradual pace of both the last 40 years and the period before 1920. "If you think about the productivity effects of the computer revolution, they started way back in the 1960s, with the first computer-produced telephone bills and bank statements and went on in the 1970s with airline reservation systems. In the early 80s there was the invention of the personal computer, the ATM cash machine and barcode scanning which greatly increased productivity in retail. And so much of the impact of computers in replacing human labor had already occurred at the time the internet was introduced in the late 1990s. And actually, depending on which part of the internet you are looking at, it was introduced before then. Most of us were doing email by the early 90s. Amazon was founded in 1994, so we're 20 years now into the age of e-commerce," says Gordon. "There is plenty of room in my forecast for evolutionary change. What is lacking is sharp, discrete change."

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