The Patriot Post® · Will We Need Technology to Shock Economic Growth?

Half of the GDP growth America has experienced over the last 60 years has been due to advances of technology making work more efficient, writes American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis. But as computer chips have gotten more powerful and more efficient machines have helped the American worker produce more, the labor force has started to shrink and Pethokoukis theorizes any future economic growth will be fueled by technological innovation. Now, a report by the San Francisco Fed predicts the nation’s future economic growth will be slow, as technological innovation has possibly slowed. The Fed writes, “However, uncertainty about future productivity growth remains high. Pessimists argue that IT is less important than great innovations of the past that dramatically boosted productivity, such as electricity or the internal combustion engine. Optimists point to the possibilities offered by robots and machine learning.” Whatever the future holds, it rests in the hands of enterprising Americans free from dampening government regulation. More…