Q & A

But what about the rest of the world? On the surface, the news looks good. China's already giant economy is still expanding by almost 8% per year. India's growth tops five percent, and Argentina and Brazil are steadily prospering.

Yet in each of these regions, there is darkness on the horizon. A major UNUnited Nations. An intergovernmental organisation based in New York that aims to maintain international peace and security. report has confidently predicted that Latin American growth will sharply fall this year. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal reports "new signs of China slowdown", warning that the world economy could suffer. These emerging economiesCountries that are developing quickly and playing a bigger role in world trade. are still getting richer. But their growth today is far less dramatic than it was five years ago.

The evidence is clear: we are in the midst of a global economic slowdown. That sounds bad enough. But now, a respected economist has suggested that the current "crisis" may be more than a temporary slump.

For 250 years the world economy has experienced a spectacular boom: today's global GDPShort for Gross Domestic Product, the measure of all the goods and services produced inside a country. is a hundred times higher than it was in 1820. But constant growth is not a natural law. Before 1700, increases in wealth been almost imperceptible for at least two thousand years. Could this age of prosperity have been a one-off? Must we simply accept that recessionA period of economic decline. A recession occurs when a country's Gross Domestic Product falls for six months in a row.  and stagnation are the new normal?

Professor Robert Gordon suspects so. The recent surge in wealth was powered, he says, by a flood of inventions - factories, steam power, plumbing, electricity, production lines, flight - that enabled a small number of people to produce huge amounts of goods. These were the "industrial revolutions".

Recently, however, these innovations have dried up. There have been plenty of ingenious inventions since 1960, from mobile phones to the internet; but few, says Prof Gordon, have seriously boosted wealth.

Winter is coming

Most find this vision deeply pessimisticTending to believe that the worst will happen.. We have grown accustomed to a world in which quality of life is constantly improving, from generation to generation and year to year. If these times of plenty are at an end, many say, who knows what miseries are in store? War? Poverty? Or simply boredom? In any case, we must brace ourselves for a more hard and austereMinimal, bare or unadorned. The word often comes with a connotation of seriousness, perhaps excessive seriousness. way of life.

But is economic growth really so vital for general wellbeing? Not everybody thinks so. Instead of just counting our coins, some suggest, we should think about how we use them. Instead of tracking GDP, we should measure success by happiness and quality of life. This is not a tragedy, they say: it is an opportunity.

Does GDP have any impact on real life? Yes. GDP is a way of measuring how much money is circulating in an economy. So higher GDP means more money. Economic growth doesn't necessarily mean that you will personally be richer, or more likely to get a job - but without economic growth, it is much less likely that the general standard of living will improve.

So I can expect to be poor and unemployed all my life? Nobody's suggesting that: it's just that you may have to settle for the same quality of life as your parents. And even that is hotly disputed: many economists object to Prof Gordon's claims, arguing that many technologies currently in development could boost productivity just as dramatically as steam power and electricity.