Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-101) and index.

The low-hanging fruit we ate: land, technology, and uneducated kids -- Our new (not so) productive economy -- Does the Internet change everything? Price, production, and revenue -- The government of the low-hanging fruit: left, right, and upside down -- Why did we have such a big financial crisis? Bankers, museum directors, you, and me -- Can we fix things? The great difference then and now.

"...the eSpecial heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of our economic malaise is now--at last--a book. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, median wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters than the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect for scientific enterprise and the pursuit of innovations that benefit not only powerful elites, but humanity as a whole."--Dust jacket flaps.