We may be half-drowning, but we're not stagnating

Some months ago, in an encounter with Tyler Cowen's ebook The Great Stagnation, I questioned Cowen's premise that technological transformation of human life has slowed down in recent decades, that is

whether we're living in an era in which transformative technological innovation is in short supply. Cowen does allow "the Internet" as the great exception, but points out that the leading-edge tech companies employ relatively few people, and that Internet innovation has been notoriously difficult to monetize. He is strangely silent, though, about the impact of interactive technology and computer technology more generally on production and commerce of all kinds -- just-in-time factory production, product customization, bar coding, all the incredible efficiencies of large-scale retail operations that wring out large profits on tiny margins -- and on interactive technology's role in globalizing production. He also doesn't consider transformative technologies hiding in plain sight: personal computers themselves (never mind the Internet) and cell phones. It's true, as Cowen says, that the basic physical components of middle class life in America don't look that much different than they did in the 1960s. But they are much different. And the differences have generated a lot of wealth, even if  the U.S. middle class hasn't garnered as large a share as it did in he previous generation.

That demurral is advanced at book length by MIT scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that computer and network technology is indeed, like the steam engine and electricity before them, a "general purpose technology" (GPT), that is, one that accelerates economic progress in a world-transforming way.  IT's transformative power is an inevitable effect of Moore's Law: we have lived through a time of sustained exponential growth in processing power, which has brought us to the brink of self-driving cars, chap robots that function more or less as mini-factories, and viable automated translation and communication. While the landscape may not yet have been as visibly transformed as it was by prior GPTs, as Cowen argues, business processes have. Regarding  the Web and enterprise resource planning and CRM software, for example: