These figurative "low-hanging fruit" include the cultivation of much free, previously unused land, technological breakthroughs in transport, refrigeration, electricity, mass communications, sanitation, and the growth of education.

[3] In Chapter 1, Cowen describes the three major forms of "low-hanging fruit": the ease of cultivating free and unused land, rapid invention from 1880 to 1940 which capitalized on the scientific breakthroughs of the 18th and 19th centuries and the large returns from sending intelligent but uneducated children to school and university.

[5] He further argues that the failure to diagnose the trend has led to a degradation in political discourse since left and right leaning actors blame the policies of "the other side" and "what I like to call the 'honest middle' cannot be heard above the din.

The biggest Internet companies employ at most a few thousand people, and relatively few services are paying: "We have a collective historical memory that technological progress brings a big and predictable stream of revenue growth across most of the economy.

Cowen says Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) puts the "cart before the horse" in asking for high marginal tax rates, unionization, and an egalitarian distribution of income and wealth.

[7] Cowen argues that the failure to recognize the stagnation has led to poor policy ideas from the right (such as "revenue generating tax cuts") and the left (redistribution of incomes).

"[10] He argues that despite a series of regular, smaller crises since the 1980s, the crash was ultimately caused by investors taking too much risk across the economy, "housing and sub-prime loans were the proverbial canary in the coalmine.

Cowen praises the development of India and China as producers and consumers, the role of the internet in enlarging the scientific community, and a growing consensus for the reform of educational policy in the US.

Matthew Yglesias described the book's themes as a continuation and expansion of those developed by Paul Krugman in The Age of Diminished Expectations, Third Edition: U.S. Economic Policy in the 1990s (1997).

[12] Both books treat the diminishing rate of return from basic science and the effects that it has on politics, specifically "that a growing share of innovative energy is going into rent-seeking or otherwise unproductive activities".

[13] Timothy Noah compared it to Prosperity: The Coming Twenty Year Boom and What it Means to You[14] by Bob Davis[15] and David Wessel, an enormously popular book at the time (1998) which today resells for a penny.

[16] He described how both Prosperity and The Great Stagnation examine the puzzle of stagnant median wages though offer starkly different opinions about the prospects for future growth and in particular the role of information technologies in that.

[16] He concluded by calling Cowen's appeal to "realistic expectations" about growth a "weird conservative echo" of the Club of Rome's liberal "era of limits gospel from the 1970s".

[18] Gordon also points out that the easy gains of increased labor force participation, schooling or land use have been spent, while other major innovations or industries—such as transport or sanitation—have enjoyed only gradual improvement.

[25] Timothy Noah, writing in Slate, did not share Cowen's optimism about the future of American educational attainment on the basis that President Obama "is getting tough" on teachers' unions.

[26] The Economist criticized Cowen for associating the economic problems resulting from the 2008 financial crisis to his broader thesis, arguing instead that this was mostly caused by a demand shock and mostly preventable.

[22] Some scholars, such as Jim Rickards, Howard Qi, Hongbin Song, etc., point out that the demand shock was only the phenomenon, a result of a more serious underlying structural problem in the American economy.

It proposed taxing "bads" such as traffic congestion and pollution rather than "goods" such as income, reducing spending on medical treatments with no clear benefits, and removing agricultural subsidies and mortgage interest deduction.

[22] In The Economist, two different sets of policy responses were considered depending on whether the true cause is ailing technological innovation or a decline in workers' bargaining power in the face of emerging-market industrialization.

Progressive taxation and redistribution would offset labor's position of weakness whilst a limited state would reduce commitments it cannot expect to fulfill in a stagnating economy.

[1][27] Yglesias described the publication as an innovation in "current affairs publishing" and "much shorter and cheaper than a conventional book in a way that actually leaves you wanting to read more once you finish it.

"What is exciting is to imagine students, economists, and scientists across the country reading the book, coming to terms with the depth of our challenge and pursuing new ways of trying to 'fix' things or generally improve our lot.