Economy

Innovation and the Wealth of Cities

A new Brookings report looks at the relationship between innovation and regional economic growth.
Brookings Institution

Is America losing its innovative edge? If you read the business press, you'd certainly have reason to think so.

Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of The Great Stagnation, and Robert Gordon author of influential recent study which asks "Is US Economic Growth Over?" both argue that innovation has plateaued; that the great life-changing inventions — automobiles, airplanes, electric lights, antibiotics, refrigeration — are in the past, and that the economic effects of today's technological breakthroughs will ultimately be incremental. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel was recently quoted in The Economist declaring that innovation in America is "somewhere between dire straits and dead."