> Eh, but Nicholas Crafts, apparently one of the world's most eminent economic
> historian, actually engaged with Brenner recently in NLR. He was highly
> critical of Brenner's overall thesis - although I detect a certain amount of
> misunderstanding. He claimed that we should refer to the '73 - '05 period as
> the "great moderation".
>
> However, he readily admits that there has been a massive slowdown of
> productivity growth in the Western economies. He writes the following:
>
> "Clearly, there was a big growth slowdown after 1973. Growth of real GDP per
> person in the countries of western Europe averaged 4.06 per cent per year in
> the years 1950 - 1973, but only 1.86 per cent from 1973 - 2005, while for
> the US growth in these two periods was, respectively, 2.45 and 1.91 per
> cent."
>
Not true. Crafts says productivity growth experienced a dramatic revival in the United States starting in 1995, which is uncontroversial:
> [In the table shown,] the post-1973 period is split at 1995, as is now
> conventional in the mainstream economics literature. This table
> suggests that the ‘long downturn’ is a more apt description of the
> experience of the big European economies than for the United States.
> For France and Germany, there is a marked fall in productivity growth
> after 1973 and a further sizeable reduction after 1995. For the United
> States, however, after a period of very weak productivity growth
> between 1973 and 1995, a strong revival followed such that
> productivity growth was slightly above the 1950 to 1973 level.
PP:
> I think the argument is cast in terms of long-term capital dynamics rather
> than random and arbitrary periodisation. Hence the fact that Brenner
> concludes that growth is tailing off after the post-war bump and that we're
> all fucked, while Crafts maintains that this bump itself was an anomaly
Well, the postwar "bump" obviously *was* an anomaly. That's why you called it a bump. So Crafts is right, no?
SA