This article by Michael Mandel – who is the chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute and a senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management: “The United States and the other major advanced economies are currently stuck in a seemingly endless twilight of slow growth. The numbers are ugly: The April 2013 forecast from the International Monetary Fund predicts that economic growth in Europe will average only 1.7% over the next five years. Japan is projected to average only 1.2% growth. Germany, held up as a paragon of success, is expected to grow at only 1.3% annually. The United States is doing better than Europe and Japan, but not by much. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is currently projecting that the underlying growth rate of the U.S. economy—the so-called ‘potential’ growth—is around 2.2% annually, compared to an average of roughly 3.3% in the post-war period. Both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, miles apart on most issues, have accepted the slow-growth scenario. That helps explain, in part, the political gridlock in Washington. An economy growing at barely over 2% per year doesn’t generate enough income to pay for everything that Americans need: Social Security and Medicare for the aging population, defense spending sufficient to handle critical threats, and support for essential government investment in basic research, education, and infrastructure. The longer that the slow-growth assumption gets locked in, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet we are not stuck with the slow-growth scenario and the endless and frustrating Washington policy debates about dividing a shrinking pie. Over the past year, a series of studies from research institutes and industry have laid out a compelling new vision of a high-growth future—one that that could revolutionize manufacturing and energy, create employment for the jobless generation, and bring back rising living standards.”