Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream
by Jonathan Gruber & Simon Johnson
Jump-Starting America is the ambitious new book written by two distinguished MIT economists, Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson. They examine why the US economy has stagnated over the past two decades, including in the innovation sector, because of the collapse in Cold War defense spending. They propose their nationwide plan to “jump-start” it again, creating more jobs and reducing inequality in the process.
As the full title — Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream — indicates, this book is a call to action for strategic investing in science and technology. This would amount to reversing the federal cuts undertaken in the 1980s, and if orchestrated in the right way, returning (or even exceeding) postwar levels of economic prosperity.
Jonathan Gruber spoke to Five Books about the best books on public policy.
Simon Johnson spoke to Five Books about the best books on why economic history matters.
Commentary
“most Americans think that United States must be doing pretty well when it comes to innovation. Thus, it might come as a shock for most people to hear that there are serious problems in the American innovation economy, but MIT professors Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson argue that there are.”
Review by economist Robert D. Atkinson in the New York Journal of Books
The book, according to the author