As I should have suspected from the context, this concerns Robert Gordon's epic The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which I've read and am trying to synthesize a review.

The article here suffers from much one of the book's major faults: it's an epic romp through the details of technological advance, and their impacts, both of which are admittedly interesting, but lacking in the backbone of theory and a model to explain both what technology is, specifically (one definition, from Gordon, is "the sum of our ignorance", though that requires further explanation ;-), and how it impacts everyday life.

Don't get me wrong: Gordon's grasp and exposition of history is masterful, detailed, and extensively researched. Unlike much of economics, he looks pointedly at every-day impacts, and strongly questions many (though not all) the often-questionable interpretations of economists.

I also agree strongly with Gordon's conclusion that technological progress hit an apex prior to 1920. More specifically, and Neil Irwin does a huge disservice in not mentioning this, Gordon specifically distinguishes rate of change and impacts. While technology has changed markedly in his third era (the book is divided in three parts: 1870 - 1920, 1920-1970, and 1970-2015, nearly 50 years each), the impacts have been quite limited. Little in household appurtenances, particularly kitchens, has changed since 1970, other than introduction of the microwave. Transport's pretty constant. Medicine, for all the expense poured into it, has delivered virtually nothing, particularly contrasted with 1900-1950 (and, for what it's worth, earlier). Work and manufacture has changed, but only modestly, and productivity as measured by economists (dollar output per worker hour) has increased at best modestly.

And, sorry, HN, but Gordon's quite harsh on information technology -- it delivered, somewhat, from 1994 - 2004, but little 2005 - 2015.

That's all covered in the book, and missing from Irwin's article.

What Gordon himself misses is IMO even more interesting.

His core thesis is what's called "the Solow Residual" -- what's left over in regression analysis after accounting for economic growth using capital and labour. (Gordon was a student of Robert Solow's). What bothers me, greatly, is that Gordon all-but-answers his own question -- he points at the 99% growth in worker productivity 1920-1950, and the 133% increase in horsepower and kW per worker over the same period. On numerous grounds, power makes sense to consider in transformational activity.

Gordon completely dismisses it.

Several other researchers have dug into that in depth. Robert A. Ayres (apparently it's a rule for all economists in this saga to be named "Robert") is one, there've been other analysis, including Hall and Klitgaard, and a recent item I've seen. Solow and Ayres had a correspondence according to Solow's archive at Duke University, though I don't know the upshot of it.

Another element missing from Gordon's analysis is some sort of theory of technology -- what it is, how it operates. He describes this to some extent, but it's quite insufficient. He mentions the real-world, everyday-life impacts of many early technologies, but doesn't think to reference Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, another lacking point.

Along with that is a metric of technological impact. Gordon's is GDP and especially GDP/worker. This is actually and area of some disagreement in various circles, but a concept of energy throughput has been proposed by Leslie White, known as White's Law.

I could also quibble with some economic discussions and considerations, though most are quite secondary to his point and if anything would, corrected, strengthen his basic thesis.

But yeah, today's got nothing on the 1880s, progress-wise.