I’m rereading “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” and found this passage to be quite thought-provoking when it comes to AI. Will AI be looked back on by historians as a “Great Invention?” I think so! Will rising income inequality (or our attempts to resolve it) cancel it out (or worse)? I don’t know, but it’s looking like it will be front and center in the next election —— This book is based on an important idea having innumerable implications: “Economic growth is not a steady process that creates economic advance at a regular pace, century after century. Instead, progress occurs much more rapidly in some times than in others. There was virtually no economic growth for millennia until 1770, only slow growth in the transition century before 1870, remarkably rapid growth in the century ending in 1970, and slower growth since then. Our central thesis is that some inventions are more important than others, and that the revolutionary century after the Civil War was made possible by a unique clustering, in the late nineteenth century, of what we will call the "Great Inventions." However, any consideration of U.S. economic progress in the future must look beyond innovation to contemplate the headwinds that are blowing like a gale to slow down the vessel of progress. Chief among these headwinds is the rise of inequality that since 1970 has steadily directed an ever larger share of the fruits of the American growth machine to the top of the income distribution.”