رشد اقتصادی ایالات متحده درعصر طلاکاری شده

In the immediate postwar period, Moses Abramovitz and Robert Solow both examined data on output and input growth from the first half of the 20th century and reached similar conclusions. In the 20th century, in contrast with the nineteenth, a much smaller fraction of real output growth could be swept back to the growth of inputs conventionally measured. The rise of the residual, they suggested, was an important distinguishing feature of 20th century growth. This paper identifies two difficulties with this claim. First, TFP growth virtually disappeared in the US between 1973 and 1995. Second, TFP growth was in fact quite robust between the end of the Civil War and 1906, as was in fact acknowledged by Abramovitz in his 1993 Economic History Association Presidential address. Developing a revised macroeconomic narrative is essential in reconciling our interpretation of these numbers with what we know about scientific, technological, and organizational change during the gilded age.

In the immediate postwar period, Moses Abramovitz and Robert Solow both examined data on output and input growth for the United States and reached striking and similar conclusions. The pattern of disembodied technical change in the United States appeared to be markedly different in the 20th century as compared with the nineteenth. In the 20th century, a much smaller fraction of real output growth could be swept back to the growth of inputs conventionally measured: the residual, correspondingly, was much larger. Abramovitz published his findings in 1956, Solow in 1957, and their generalization rapidly became accepted as identifying a permanent change in the sources of economic advance. At the end of his career, Abramovitz continued to characterize the 20th century as experiencing “Growth in the Era of Knowledge Based Progress”, distinguishing it from the nineteenth (Abramovitz and David, 2000).1

Productivity advance in any period is the consequence of the exploitation of technical foundations which have been established earlier and breakthroughs that are rapidly commercialized and have their impact within the same epoch. The period 1871–1913 is no different in this regard. The technical foundations for the railroad and the telegraph were pre-Civil War, although the proximately significant advances that allowed for the plummeting prices of steel and aluminum took place after the war. The rapid progress in scientific, technical, and organizational knowledge during the two generations prior to the First World War laid the foundations for 20th century advance, particularly that remarkable period between the two world wars. But it also underlay the qualitative and quantitative changes that characterized the epoch – the multifaceted improvements that in the minds of so many observers irrevocably separated the world of 1910 from that a half century earlier.