Podcast
The Ezra Klein Show
The book was highlighted as a key argument that the rapid growth of the early industrial era is unlikely to return, tracing the transformation between the late 19th and mid‑20th centuries. Ethan Mollick introduced it in a discussion about AI, and the host Roger cited it as a seminal, though pessimistic, analysis of the historic wave of innovation and its recent decline. Both episodes presented it as essential reading for understanding future productivity challenges.
Episode: How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?
Mollick described the book as an argument that the rapid growth of the early industrial era will not recur and explained how the world changed between the late1800s and mid1900s.
One of them is The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which is an argument about why we will never have the kind of growth that we did in the first part of the Industrial Revolution again. It describes how the world changed between 1870 or 1890 and 1940 versus 1940 and 1990 or 2000, showing the transformation of the world during that period.
Episode: How Martin Wolf Understands This Global Economic M...
The guest called it a seminal, somewhat pessimistic work that examines the historic wave of innovation and its recent decline.
The last is to me a seminal book which is sort of in a way an anti-Acemoglu and Robinson was by Robert Gordon, it's called The Rise and Fall of American Growth and it really explores why there was this huge wave of innovation between 1880 and 1940 roughly, 1950, 1960 actually into the 60s and then the decline and it's much more pessimistic and that is very disturbing for the future because if productivity growth slows, I think it becomes much more difficult to sustain our sort of society.
