The Slo-Mo Economy

Economist Marc Levinson argues that we won’t be replicating the postwar boom anytime soon.

- Peter Coy

In 1973, when Barbra Streisand starred with Robert Redford in The Way We Were, she sang longingly about “misty watercolor memories.” In retrospect, 1973 itself was a year to remember. It was the end of a golden era—a period of rapid growth in productivity and living standards that had no predecessor and hasn’t been repeated.

In An Extraordinary Time, economist and journalist Marc Levinson says the good times are over for good, or at least for the foreseeable future. The boom from 1948 to ’73 was extraordinary. What we have now, his subtitle asserts, is “the return of the ordinary economy.”

An Extraordinary Time (Basic Books, $27.99) won’t sit well with people who believe that removing various obstacles to growth would bring back the way we were. The U.S. economy has been grinding out 2 percent growth since 2009. Donald Trump said in the third presidential debate, “I actually think we can go higher than 4 percent. I think you can go to 5 percent or 6 percent.”