American Living Standards: Threats and Challenges

Professor Robert E Litan

Jan 1988 · Brookings Institution Press

About this ebook

American Living Standards contends that the central problem of the U.S. economy has been for some years now, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, the slowdown in the growth of living standards. This decline began in the early 1970s, was masked by a resort to overseas borrowing in the early 1980s, and now threatens to get worse in the years immediately ahead as the foreign debt bills come due.The editors and contributes to this volume seek to advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of this potential slowdown in the growth of living standards. Equally important, the book examines what policy measure holds out the best hope for presenting, or at the very least, minimizing this slowdown.Various chapters explore the changes in the level and distribution of incomes that have occurred in recent years; changes in the quality and distribution of jobs among industries and regions; what economists do and do not know about recent trends in productivity growth and in the quality of education; and what events could trigger a recession.

About the author

Robert E. Litan is a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and vice president for research and policy at the Kaufmann Foundation. His most recent book is Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (Yale, 2007), written with William Baumol and Carl Schramm.

Robert Z. Lawrence, nonresident senior fellow, is the Albert L. Williams Professor of Trade and Investment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also the author or coauthor of several books, including Blue-Collar Blues: Is Trade to Blame for Rising US Income Inequality? (2008), Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation (2006), Anchoring Reform with a US-Egypt Free Trade Agreement (2005), and Has Globalization Gone Far Enough? The Costs of Fragmented Markets (2004).

Schultze was a Brookings senior fellow and professor of economics at the University of Maryland at the time these lectures were prepared. Director of the Bureau of the Budget in the Johnson administration, he is now Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.