Conclusion

Technological invention is uneven, and comes in bursts; that much has for a long time been clear to students of growth. Electricity and IT are, to most observers, the two most important GPTs to date, or at least they seem so according to the three criteria that Bresnahan and Trajtenberg proposed.

The Electricity and IT eras differ in some important ways. Electrification was more broadly adopted, whereas IT seems to be technologically more revolutionary. The pro­ductivity slowdown is stronger in the IT era but the ongoing spread of IT and its continuing precipitous price decline are reasons for optimism about growth in the com­ing decades relative to what happened in the middle of the 20th century following the spread of Electricity. But it is the similarities between the two epochs that are the most instructive and that will guide our expectations about how the next GPT will affect economic life when it comes along.

Acknowledgements

We thank Jason Cummins, Bart Hobijn, Josh Lerner and Gianluca Violante for provid­ing us with some of the data used here. This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. 30-3207-00-0079-286.

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