Pregame

Robert Gordon’s official title is the Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences at Northwestern University. Translation: he’s an economics badass. His new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, has made serious waves since it was published in January. North by Northwestern sat down with him to discuss Facebook, the job market and Dillo.

Condense your book into two sentences.

We had a special century from 1870 to 1970, where an amazing number of things were invented that completely changed human existence both on the job and at home. Since 1970 we’ve had the computer revolution, but its impact has been narrower, and while profound, it has not affected human life in anything like the way the great inventions of the special century did.

Do you not see these larger breakthroughs happening again?

The big innovation in the last 10 years has been social networks. It’s been the degree of communication and photo sharing among ordinary people. That certainly has improved the standard of living. It has not directly improved business productivity. You don’t gain the extra productivity to be able to pay higher wages just because your employees are shooting pictures back and forth to each other.

Is R&D (research and development) into this sort of stuff looking in the wrong direction?

They’re looking just where they should: where they think they can make money. If consumers are willing to pay for virtual reality goggles and the latest coolest software, and their payments make some people rich, then that’s where invention will go, even if it doesn’t raise productivity in the business part of the economy.

For Northwestern students graduating in the next five years, what does your theory mean for them?

Northwestern undergraduates should pay a lot of attention to the development of artificial intelligence and try to stay away from occupations that have prospects of being replaced by computers. If you have an expensive college education, you don’t want to be caught in an occupation where you’re competing with computers.

What can we do to bring back this era of American economic success?

I think we need much more aggressive, federally financed preschool programs. The social distance in this country between the bottom and the top or the bottom and the middle is much different than in many countries. Here we are in Evanston, Illinois, and we have enormous gaps between the white and the Black populations in school, even though it’s a well-funded school system. [Addressing that] has been at the heart of sociology and the education literature going back for 50 years.

Have you ever been to Dillo Day?

No, I don’t even know what it is.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.