Sozial-ökologische Transformation und Eigentum

Our point of departure in ‘Seven Theses’ was the observation that the Long Downturn that has gripped the world economy since the early 1970s has proved more persistent than many commentators expected. As Benanav notes, however, there is now a widening consensus among economic historians on the reality of stagnation. Robert Gordon has documented the mediocre performance of American Total Factor Productivity (TFP) since the 1970s, while Bradford DeLong highlights the ‘significant drop’ in worker-productivity growth for the 1973–2010 period. Ruchir Sharma notes that ‘productivity growth has slowed sharply since 1980’. In a similar vein Thomas Philippon argues that the slowdown in TFP growth ‘started in 2000 and is now widespread among rich countries’, adding that the Great Recession of 2008–09 ‘has probably reinforced this negative trend but it has not created it’. In ‘The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, the FT’s Martin Wolf avers: ‘Average productivity growth in the 2010s (between 2010 and 2019) became dismal in all high-income countries. This is important and depressing.’