This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 29th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Is the United States doomed to a long period of slow economic growth.

Cato Institute Vice President for research,

Brink-Linsy argues that slow growth is not inevitable,

but in the short term it's quite likely.

His new paper, why growth is getting harder,

is available now at Cato.org.

The Tyler Cowan argument, which you've talked about extensively, is essentially that at least for the time being we've snagged all the low hanging fruit with respect to

Technological innovation and that sort of thing we've gotten, productivity gains that we've gotten them.

And there aren't a lot to be had, at least in the near term.

And you take issue with some of that.

So yes, Tyler Cowan wrote the Great Stagnation where he argued that

growth had been slowing over recent decades because among other things we've run

out of big ticket innovations great new ideas for improving consumer welfare.

Another economist Robert Gordon has seen Cowan and raised him a few by arguing that there's really no great new innovations

in the pipeline foreseeable and that the 250-year episode of modern economic growth is about to run out.

I'm agnostic and dubious about any grim future for innovation.

If I had to put a bet down, I would bet that the future for innovation. If I had to put a bet down I would bet that the future

of innovation is very bright. However, there are other factors that contribute to economic

growth besides innovation and those factors have swung in a

negative direction. So even if innovations future is bright I'm afraid that

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