Fully Grown

Why a stagnant economy is a sign of success

Summary

An Economist Best Book of the Year, 2020

Rather than a sign of economic failure, our current slowdown is a sign of our widespread economic success. Our powerful economy has already supplied so much of the necessary stuff of modern life, brought us so much comfort, security, and luxury, that we have turned to new forms of production and consumption that increase our well-being but do not contribute to growth in GDP per capita.

Available now from the University of Chicago Press. Find it at Amazon

Reviews and mentions

New Yorker

Washington Post

The Economist

Marginal Revolution

Seeking Alpha

Wall Street Journal

Strategy and Business

Enlightened Economist (Diane Coyle)

Financial Times

Maclean's

Inside Story

Data and Code

You can replicate everything in the book using the code and data in the Github repository for this project. There is nothing super technical about that - you can easily download everything in a convenient zip file to use on your own computer. The advantage of Github is that the link will always point to the latest version of my code if I fix anything.

All the figures and tables in the book were created using publicly available data, in many cases downloaded directly from FRED. Other data was pulled by me from various places on the web, and the sources are documented as part of the code you can download.