Bush’s Crash Test Economics

Fifteen years ago, the United States was in the midst of what you could call its “Age of Diminished Expectations.” Productivity gains had stalled, energy prices were high, the backlog of potential technologies that originated in the Great Depression had been exhausted, and waning benefits from economies of scale led nearly every economist to project that economic growth would be slower in the future than it had been in the past. With productivity growth stagnating for almost two decades, it made sense back then to argue that the US government’s social-insurance commitments (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) were excessive and so had to be scaled back.

That was then, this is now. The intervening years have seen an explosion of technological innovation that has carried America’s general productivity growth back up to its pre-slowdown levels. Indeed, today the US economy is standing on the brink of biotechnological and, perhaps, nanotechnological revolutions of vast scale and scope. Yet the same calls to scale back America’s social commitments are heard.

Social Security’s actuaries may not have fully recognized the impact of today’s technological revolutions, but they have markedly boosted the scale of the system that the US government can afford. Fifteen years ago, the consensus was that America's Social Security System was in huge trouble, that it needed the equivalent of an engine rebuild. Today its problems look, as the Brookings Institution economist Peter Orszag says, much more like the equivalent of a slow tire leak: you have to fix it eventually, but it isn’t very hard to do and repair it isn’t terribly urgent.

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