Matthew C Klein, Columnist

The Future Will Be Different From the Past, Economists Conclude

Depending on which elite economists you ask, the U.S. will face decades of stagnation or is about to enjoy unprecedented progress and prosperity.

February 18, 2014 at 11:55 PM UTC

By Matthew C Klein

Matthew C. Klein writes for Bloomberg View about the economy and financial markets. He previously wrote for the Economist magazine and its economics blog, Free Exchange. Before that, Klein was a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he spent more than two years studying the history of the Federal Reserve and the intellectual history of monetary economics for an upcoming book by Sebastian Mallaby. He also worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he studied the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and advised institutional investors on asset-liability management. Klein has a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University. Originally from Chicago, he lives in New York.

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Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, has made a name for himself as the seer of stagnation: In his estimation, real incomes for most Americans will grow little if at all during the next few decades.

Erik Brynjolffson and Andrew McAfee, a pair of scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have a more sanguine take: The inventions of the "second machine age" will soon lead to an era of seemingly boundless prosperity.