GROWTH ENDED ON October 16, 1973, or thereabouts, and is never to return, according to a wonderfully opinionated book by Robert Gordon.1

On that day, the member countries of OPEC announced an embargo on oil. By the time the embargo was lifted in March 1974, the price of oil had quadrupled. The world economy at this time had become increasingly reliant on oil and was generally facing raw material shortages that were pushing up prices.

This happened in a world where most citizens of these rich countries had grown up expecting endless and ever-expanding prosperity, where political leaders had grown accustomed to measuring their success in terms of a single yardstick: the rate of growth of the country’s gross domestic product, or GDP. And to a large extent this is still the world we live in, and in some sense we are still talking about that pivotal moment in the 1970s. What went wrong? Was there a policy mistake? Can we coax growth to return and stay? What magic button do we need to press? Is China immune to this slowdown?

Economists have been busy answering these questions. Countless books and papers have been written about them. Many Nobel Prizes have been awarded. After all that, what is it that can be said with confidence about how to make rich economies grow faster? Or does the fact so much has been written signal that we really have no idea? And should we even be concerned?