Noah Smith in his Substack newsletter, Noahpinion:
This blog started out a year ago as an explicitly techno-optimist blog, and I feel like I’ve gotten away from that a little bit. This isn’t because I’m less optimistic about technology, but because it’s very easy to get distracted by stuff like economic policy, social unrest, China’s economy, Covid, and so on. But it’s time to go back to my roots a little here.
It’s still too early to tell whether we’ll get the Roaring Twenties that some have predicted. There are certainly reasons for doubt. After a great first quarter, labor productivity is now actually falling, due mostly to supply chain snarls disrupting production, but also possibly due to Covid variants and the uncertain and chaotic process of workers partially returning to the office. Goldman Sachs, one of the early proponents of the Roaring Twenties thesis, is now forecasting anemic growth in the year ahead.
More here.