Productivity Growth, Inflation, and Unemployment : The Collected Essays of Robert J. Gordon

The seventeen seminal essays by Robert J. Gordon collected here, including three previously unpublished works, offer sharply etched views on the principal topics of macroeconomics - growth, inflation, and unemployment. The author re-examines their salient points in a uniquely creative, accessible introduction that serves on its own as an introduction to modern macroeconomics. Each of the four parts into which the essays are grouped also offers a new introduction. The papers in Part I explore different key aspects of the history, theory, and measurement of productivity growth. The essays in Part II investigate the sources of business cycles and productivity fluctuations. Those in Part III cover the effects of supply shocks in macroeconomics. The final group presents empirical studies of the dynamics of inflation in the United States. The foreword by Nobel Laureate Robert M. Solow comments on the abiding importance of these essays drawn from 1968 to the present. "This collection of seventeen essays treats the three core topics of macroeconomics - economic growth, inflation, and unemployment. In all three topic areas, the essays have established the context of macroeconomic discussions, including the author's early skepticism that the New Economy and Internet warranted the hype and overblown stock market valuations of the late 1990s, His reinterpretation of the roles of capital accumulation and technological change in economic growth, his reinvention of Keynesian macroeconomics as the interplay of shocks not just to aggregate demand but also to aggregate supply, and his symmetric explanation of why inflation and unemployment were so high in the 1970s and so low in the late 1990s. This collection is unique not only in the importance of its topics and conclusions, but in the novelty of its five newly written introductions, one for the entire book and four new introductions to the separate parts of the book. Each introduction goes beyond summarizing the contribution of the individual essays, setting them in the context of past and current macroeconomic debates and tracing the origins of the ideas and their subsequent evolution. The collection contains three previously unpublished essays on technology and productivity that gain new relevance in today's economy."--Jacket. Seventeen essays include three previously unpublished works and offer sharply etched views on the principal topics of growth, inflation, and unemployment. Robert Gordon re-examines their salient points in a new accessible introduction to modern macroeconomics. Each of the four parts into which the essays are grouped also offers a new introduction. The foreword by Nobel Laureate Robert M. Solow comments on the continuing importance of these essays which date from 1968 to the present. The 17 seminal essays by Robert J. Gordon collected here, including three previously unpublished works, offer views on the principal topics of macroeconomics - namely, growth, inflation, and unemployment. The author re-examines their salient points in a creative, accessible introduction that serves on its own as an introduction to modern macroeconomics The gains to human welfare resulting from even minor increases in the rate of economic growth are enormous.