A bleak economic future

ROBERT Lucas, a towering figure of 20th-century macroeconomics and a Nobel laureate, opined on economic growth and the standard of living that “the consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: once one starts to think about them, it is hard to think about anything else” (On the Mechanics of Economic Development, 1988). The context of his observation was the significant differences in standards of living across the globe. I contemplated the same — specifically, whether our economic future might offer us some respite from our perennial failures. Sadly,…