"...Judging from all the hype, the economic book of 2016 is Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Gordon’s book offers the definitive account of how the many technological innovations between 1870 and 1940 dramatically improved life in the United States. But the book is utterly silent on why American society was capable of making such a radical transformation during that period. Gordon’s book has attracted much attention because of his warning that America is not likely to again see such dramatic improvements in the standard of living. The question is why. A big part of the answer is that these innovations coincided with a period of American history when laissez-faire capitalism was at its peak. Growth started to decline because of the massive expansion of the government occasioned by the New Deal, which put a strain on the free market…
http://www.hoover.org/research/real-cause-american-growth