Paul Krugman: A New Industrial Revolution: The Rise of the Robots

It's taken me a while to get around to Bob Gordon's stimulating essay suggesting that the great days of economic growth are behind us. It's not that different from things he's been saying before, and I have in the past had a lot of sympathy for that view. I now believe, however, that his technological pessimism is wrong — or if you prefer, it's the wrong kind of pessimism. But this is definitely a discussion worth having.

Mr. Gordon, an economics professor at Northwestern University, argues, rightly in my view, that we've really had three industrial revolutions so far, each based on a different cluster of technologies.