Have we reached the end of economic growth?

By Brad Plumer , Updated: September 11, 2012

Why has the U.S. economy grown so lethargically over the past few years? Economists have ladled out all sorts of diagnoses. Maybe this is just your run-of-the-mill hangover after a financial crisis. Or perhaps the Federal Reserve hasn’t been aggressive enough in stimulating demand. Maybe it’s Obama’s fault. Or Congress’s fault.

Yet there’s another, more controversial theory making the rounds these days. It’s possible that our expectations for future economic growth are just too high. Perhaps the last century or so of strong economic growth in the United States was all just an aberration that’s now coming to an end. Before the Industrial Revolution took off in Great Britain, after all, the world barely experienced any economic growth. Then we got a whole bunch of nifty, life-changing technologies — from electricity to cars to airplanes. But what if that process has run its course, and we’re now entering another low-growth phase?