Welcome to the Room for Debate podcast on Vakaspajaj, member of the New York Times editorial board.

See, American economy destined to grow at a much slower pace than it did in the past.

That's one of the most contentious questions in economics today.

In his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Robert Gordon makes a case that living standards in the United States are likely to be stagnant for the next several decades

and are unlikely to match the increases seen between 1920 and 1970, a period he calls the Golden Age of Growth.

In the Times book review last month, Paul Krugman, the economist and times columnist, called Gordon's book,

Imagine Serial Combination of Deep Technological History, Vivid Portraits of Daily Life, over the past six generations and careful economic analysis.

Many economists and other scholars strongly disagree with Gordon's forecast and say America and the rest of the world can and will grow much faster than he suggests, especially political leaders adopt the right economic policies.

In a recent column in the Boston Globe, Jeffrey Sachs wrote, Fatalism is misguided.

Long-term economic improvement occurs when societies invest adequately in their future.

We will discuss the future of the American economy with Bob Gordon, who's a professor at Northwestern University in Jeff Sachs, who's a director at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a professor there.

Let's start with you, Bob Gordon.

It is clear that growth rate of the economy and living standards went down market since 1970, that there was a notable increase in growth in the 1990s.

What caused that slowdown and why do you think it will continue?

We have to take a broader perspective for more than a millennium between the Roman Empire and the 18th century, there was very little growth at all.

The best estimates for Britain, which has the best statistics, is that from 1300 to the year 1700, growth was occurring at only a rate of about 0.2% per person per year, and that rate would require 350 years for the standard of living to double.

After the late 18th century, we got the first industrial revolution with steam, cotton mills, railroads and steam ships.

Then, beginning right after the American Civil War, it came the second industrial revolution with an broad range of very different powerful inventions, including electricity, the internal combustion engine, the panoply of entertainment and communications inventions, including the phone, the phonograph,

radio, motion pictures and then later television, as well as such byproducts of daily life as central heating, running water, indoor bathrooms.

Life had changed overnight between, say, 1890 and 1940 in urban America.

Just to be there in the teens, you witnessed the number of automobiles in the United States going from 800,000 to 9 million just in one decade.

So it was a period of tremendous change that went up through 1970.

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