What Is the New Economy? Why Is Productivity Important to a Nation's Standard of Living? (2000)

Roger Charles Altman (born April 2, 1946) is an American investment banker, the founder and executive chairman of Evercore, and a former Democratic politician. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Carter administration from January 1977 until January 1981 and as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration from January 1993 until he resigned in August 1994, amid the Whitewater controversy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Altman James Kenneth Galbraith (born January 29, 1952) is an American economist who writes frequently for the popular press on economic topics. He is currently a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and at the Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. He is also part of the executive committee of the World Economics Association, created in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_K._Galbraith William Dawbney "Bill" Nordhaus (born May 31, 1941) is an economist and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, best known for his work in economic modeling and climate change. Nordhaus is the author or editor of over 20 books. He is the co-author of the textbook Economics, the original editions of which were written by Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson. The book is currently in its 19th edition and has been translated into at least 17 other languages. He has also written several books on global warming and climate change, one of his primary areas of research. Those books include Managing the Global Commons: The Economics of Climate Change (1994), which won the 2006 Award for “Publication of Enduring Quality” from the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics. Another book, with Joseph Boyer, is Warming the World: Economic Models of Global Warming (2000). His most recent book is The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World. In 1972 Nordhaus, along with fellow Yale economics professor James Tobin, published Is Growth Obsolete?,[1] an article that introduced the Measure of Economic Welfare (Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare) as the first model for economic sustainability assessment. Nordhaus is also known for his critique on current measures of national income. He wrote, "If we are to obtain accurate estimates of the growth of real incomes over the last century, we must somehow construct price indexes that account for the vast changes in the quality and range of goods and services that we consume, that somehow compare the services of horse with automobile, of Pony Express with facsimile machine, of carbon paper with photocopier, of dark and lonely nights with nights spent watching television, and of brain surgery with magnetic resonance imaging" (1997, 30).[2] Palda summarizes the importance of Nordhaus' insight as follows: "The practical lesson to be drawn from this fascinating study of lighting is that the way we measure the consumer price index is severely flawed. Instead of putting goods and their prices directly into the index we should reduce all goods to their constituent characteristics. Then we should evaluate how these goods can best be combined to minimize the cost of consuming these characteristics. Such an approach would allow us to include new goods in the consumer price index without worrying about whether the index of today is comparable to that of ten years ago when the good did not exist. Such an approach would also allow governments to more precisely calculate the rate at which welfare and other forms of aid should be increased. At present such calculations tend to overestimate the cost of living because they do not take into account the manner in which increases in quality reduce the monetary cost of maintaining a certain standard of living." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Nordhaus