An Attentive and Thoughtful Reader (called ATR from now on) will learn an enormous amount from this book about the interactions among productivity, unemployment, and inflation in the contemporary American economy. There are no more important topics within economics and not many outside of economics either. These seventeen chapters do not contain sweet nothings.

On many of today's (and tomorrow's) headline issues, ATR will have been brought to the exploratory frontier of active research. By definition, nothing at the research frontier is settled. Every conclusion is debatable (and in macroeconomics, where a lot is at stake, every conclusion is debated).

As early as Chapter One, for instance, ATR will learn many of the ins and outs involved in evaluating the belief that we now live in a “new economy,” with a dramatically faster sustainable rate of increase of (total factor) productivity than before, mostly induced by the advent of the computer and information technology. Bob Gordon counts as a skeptic on the new economy. I do not mean a skeptic as compared with the hype that suffuses the trade press and the media. Any reasonable person would be a skeptic in that context. I mean that his estimate of the sustainable long-run growth rate of productivity, net of important cyclical and temporary factors, is near the low end among serious students of the theory and data of productivity growth.