1.   Gordon, R. (2012) Is U.S. Economic growth over? Faltering innovation confronts the six headwinds. Cambridge MA. National Bureau of Economic Research.

1.Gordon2012 – Is US growth over?

2.   Parker, M. (2013) Becoming Editor: Or, Pinocchio finally notices the Strings.  Unpublished work, due to be published in Organization.

2.Parker2014 – Becoming Editor

1.   Gordon, R. (2012) Is U.S. Economic growth over? Faltering innovation confronts the six headwinds. Cambridge MA. National Bureau of Economic Research
Gordon’s paper establishes a strong causal link between innovation and economic growth in the US. However when discussing the six headwinds that are lowering long-term growth, it is strange that he does not mention military spending. The US consistently spends 4-5% of it’s GDP on military budgets. Only countries in the troubled areas of the middle-east and Africa have a bigger percentage. This strange situation where the world’s largest debtor has the largest military budget is surely something which must be resolved before other economic concerns such as education, inequality and environmental are ever successfully resolved. Is it this that the author has in mind when conceding that a Canadian or Swedish economist would not be so alarmed when looking at their own respective countries?

On Gordon’s article, I’m not sure if his basic premise is right i.e. that innovation does not have the same potential to create growth in the future and in the past.

Who after all can predict future? perhaps the next big innovation is round the corner.

For example recent developments in genetics are very promising to provide singularity by the middle of this century, which means we might be able to live healthy for almost double the life span human’s have ever lived in history. In Japan lot of work is going on in robotics to provide each & everybody with a robotic servant to do household chores and other mundane work. That would be a development which might change the way we live. Also organisations have already explored plans to extract resources from meteors & other planets etc..

2.   Parker, M. (2013) Becoming Editor: Or, Pinocchio finally notices the Strings.  Unpublished work, due to be published in Organization.
“The Wire is really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how … you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.”
David Simon
It is interesting that the author references Foucault in his paper. Foucault put forward the idea that institutions are a way of freezing particular relations of power so that a certain number of people are advantaged. In the same way that David Simon so successfully explored these themes looking at American society in The Wire, is Parker’s paper just an extension of this work focussing on academic journals and how as a journal editor you are similarly compromised? By being clear on the diagnosis of the problem but only briefly summarising potential sources of resistance is the author conceding that Academic publications have no reason to expect to be different?