Welcome to Ten Blocks. I'm Jordan McGillis, economics editor of City Journal.

Since the 1970s, advanced economies have experienced slower growth than they did in the first two-thirds of the 20th century.

The reason, according to great stagnation theorist Tyler Cowen, is that we've already picked

the technological low-hanging fruit that could deliver big returns to quality of life.

Now we're eking out better efficiency, but with real breakthroughs fewer and further between.

Into the economic malaise discourse has now arrived a new theory for how we can escape the great

stagnation. Burn Hobart and Tobias Huber argue for an unlikely remedy to slow growth,

bubbles.

In their forthcoming book, Boom, Bubbles and the End of Stagnation,

Hobart and Huber make the case that under the right conditions,

bubbles are the ideal exit ramps from stagnation.

Joining me to discuss this counterintuitive idea is author, Bern Hobart.

Burn, thanks for coming on.

Absolutely. Great to be here. Let's. Byrne, thanks for coming on. Absolutely.

Great to be here.

Let's start with the premise, the great stagnation.

Can you concretize that for us and give us examples that we might be able to recognize that show we have slowed down?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I think the place to start is that just the default state of humanity is we're very, very poor, and over our lifetime, that does not change in any visible way.

That's been the human experience from pretty much the dawn of time through about the mid-19th century, and depending on exactly where you were in the world, that hit a little bit earlier, a little bit later.

But we did reach this positive inflection point after

a long period where the GDP per capita, it wasn't just flat. It was just compounding at an

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