Preface ix
1 Introduction: The Ascent and Descent of Growth 1
PART I 1870-1940-the Great Inventions Create A Revolution Inside And Outside The Home 25
2 The Starting Point: Life and Work in 1870 27
3 What They Ate and Wore and Where They Bought It 62
4 The American Home: From Dark and Isolated to Bright and Networked 94
5 Motors Overtake Horses and Rail: Inventions and Incremental Improvements 129
6 From Telegraph to Talkies: Information, Communication, and Entertainment 172
7 Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Illness and Early Death 206
8 Working Conditions on the Job and at Home 247
9 Taking and Mitigating Risks: Consumer Credit, Insurance, and the Government 288
Entr'acte The Midcentury Shift from Revolution to Evolution 319
PART II 1940-2015-the Golden Age And The Early Warnings Of Slower Growth 329
10 Fast Food, Synthetic Fibers, and Split-Level Subdivisions: The Slowing Transformation of Food, Clothing, and Housing 331
11 See the USA in Your Chevrolet or from a Plane Flying High Above 374
12 Entertainment and Communications from Milton Berle to the iPhone 409
13 Computers and the Internet from the Mainframe to Facebook 441
14 Antibiotics, CT Scans, and the Evolution of Health and Medicine 461
15 Work, Youth, and Retirement at Home and on the Job 498
Entr'acte Toward an Understanding of Slower Growth 522
PART III The Sources Of Faster And Slower Growth 533
16 The Great Leap Forward from the 1920s to the 1950s: What Set of Miracles Created It? 535
17 Innovation: Can the Future Match the Great Inventions of the Past? 566
18 Inequality and the Other Headwinds: Long-Run American Economic Growth Slows to a Crawl 605
Postscript: America's Growth Achievement and the Path Ahead 641
Afterword to the Paperback Edition 653
Acknowledgments 659
Data Appendix 663
Notes 673
References 723
Credits 747
Index 751

How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat
In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Robert Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

Robert J. Gordon is professor in social sciences at Northwestern University. His books include Productivity Growth, Inflation, and Unemployment and Macroeconomics. Gordon was included in the 2016 Bloomberg list of the nation's most influential thinkers.