Asset Returns and Economic Growth

摘要

It is difficult to see how real U.S. GDP growth can be as rapid in the next half-century as it has been in the last. The baby boom is long past, and no similar explosion of fertility to boost the rate of labor force growth from natural increase has occurred since or is on the horizon. The modern feminist revolution is two generations old: no reservoir of potential female labor remains to be added to the paid labor force. Immigration will doubtless continue—the United States is likely still to have only one-twentieth of the world's population late in this century and to remain vastly richer than the world on average—but can immigration proceed rapidly enough to make the labor force grow as fast in the next fifty years as it did in the past fifty? Productivity growth, the other possible source of faster GDP growth, is a wild card: although we find very attractive the arguments of Robert Gordon for rapid future productivity growth, his is not the consensus view; this is shown most strikingly by the pessimistic projection of the Social Security trustees that very long run labor productivity growth will average 1.6 percent a year.