FT Alphaville has an ungated version of Robert Gordon’s latest pessimistic paper on prospects for long-run economic growth (pdf). It’s not the first time Gordon has written on this subject, although I believe this is his first definitive statement that the IT revolution has been a big disappointment.

I have mixed feelings on that one; I see his point, but wonder whether there may be a lot more yet to come. But really, the point of such papers is to make you think differently. And I was very struck by Gordon’s big example: the relative importance of fancy electronics (which he considers part of the Third Industrial Revolution) as compared with indoor plumbing (part of the second):

A thought experiment helps to illustrate the fundamental importance of the inventions of IR #2 compared to the subset of IR #3 inventions that have occurred since 2002. You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?

Indeed. If you visit one of my favorite places, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, what’s really striking about the early 1860s incarnations of the building was the lack of plumbing: outhouses outside, and water from a nearby well (with exactly the high infant mortality you’d expect as a result). By the 1930s the apartments were still grim — I described them to my parents, and they said “We grew up in that apartment!” — but they did have plumbing. And I’d say that nothing in these past 80 year matches that.