Brad DeLong: belief

Transcript context

…If we’re trying to think about the period, say, 1870 through to the 1920s, when you have some kind of modern consumer society, what’s the best number for reflecting how big that change was? I would say that you’ve got to look worldwide, and that if you look worldwide, and if you take account of the fact that world population growth has now hit more than 1 percent per year after 1870, then you had something like 1. 3 percent per year for average world real income growth from 1870 on up to the eve of World War I, worldwide. And you do what I do, which is say, “Let’s take real income growth and add half of population growth and call that technology growth.” Do that and you get something like 1.7 percent per year for the global rate of increase of “technology” from 1870 to 1913, which is four times what the worldwide average was back in the century before 1870. It’s a huge shift, and it’s one of the things that makes the modern world, as we know, even vaguely possible to imagine. If I’m trying to understand economic statistics, and if I believe the 50 years starting in 1870 changed everything, but if I also believe the last 50 years in the West did not change everything — it gave us computers and internet, but it’s had growth rates that are probably not too far from the earlier rates — what accounts for that difference? Should we then say —…

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