Economic Growth Rates Look Almost Medieval

Growth is sputtering all over the world. Germany and the U.K. have both reported that their economies shrank in the second quarter, and signs of a slowdown are apparent in lots of other places. But as central bankers gather in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and government leaders in Biarritz, France, to discuss what to do, it seems worth pointing out how slow growth already was in most rich countries even before the recent bad news. Historically slow, in the case of the U.K.:

These statistics (most of them, at least) are from the Maddison Project at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, which maintains the database of long-run per-capita gross domestic product estimates originally compiled by the late economist Angus Maddison and updated in 2018 by Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. I had been looking through it because I was curious when exactly economic growth had accelerated in Britain during the Industrial Revolution,1 and I calculated ten-year moving averages (using the compound-annual-growth-rate formula) to cut through the year-to-year noise.5