[This is one of the finalists in the 2023 book review
contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until
after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for
several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for
a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]
Its authors' academic papers are much better, so I steelman
their thesis as best I can, but it's still debatable.
Even if correct, it is much less interesting and useful than it
appears.
Epistemic status: I have a decade-old PhD in economics (not in
the field of economic growth) and a handful of peer-reviewed papers
in moderately-ranked journals. I'm not claiming to make any
original technical points, or to give a comprehensive evaluation of
the economic growth literature. My criticisms are largely straight
from the authors' own mouths.
