What are the prospects for economic growth in the United States and other advanced countries over the next several decades? U.S. growth for the past 150 years has been surprisingly stable at 2% per year. Growth theory reveals that in the long run, growth in living standards is determined by...

Advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they may increase economic growth as A.I. augments our ability to innovate. On the other hand, many experts worry that these advances entail existential risk: creating a superintelligence misaligned with human...

This paper studies a growth model that is able to match several key facts of economic history. For thousands of years, the average standard of living seems to have risen very little, despite increases in the level of technology and large increases in the level of the population. Then, after...

Why do economies exhibit sustained growth in per capita income? This paper argues that endogenous fertility and increasing returns to scale are the fundamental ingredients in understanding endogenous growth. Endogenous fertility leads the scale of the economy to grow over time. Increasing...

At least since 1950, the United States has been stimulated by increases in educational attainment, increases in research intensity, and the increased openness and development of the world economy. Such changes suggest, contrary to the conventional view, that the U.S. economy is far from its...

In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or a growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women are having fewer than two children on average. It is...

This paper considers the taxation of top incomes when the following conditions apply: (i) new ideas drive economic growth, (ii) the reward for creating a successful innovation is a top income, and (iii) innovation cannot be perfectly targeted by a separate research subsidy --- think about the...

New ideas are often combinations of existing goods or ideas, a point emphasized by Romer (1993) and Weitzman (1998). A separate literature highlights the links between exponential growth and Pareto distributions: Gabaix (1999) shows how exponential growth generates Pareto distributions, while...

Per capita income in the richest countries of the world exceeds that in the poorest countries by more than a factor of 50. What explains these enormous differences? This paper returns to several old ideas in development economics and proposes that linkages, complementarity, and superstar effects...

This paper views the standard production function in macroeconomics as a reduced form and derives its properties from microfoundations. The shape of this production function is governed by the distribution of ideas. If that distribution is Pareto, then two results obtain: the global production...