Mr. Furman said that Americans were feeling a genuine slowdown in growth, but aggravating the impact was
that the growth that had occurred “is less equally shared than before.”
For Mr. Feldstein, it is misleading measurements that are contributing to a public perception
that real incomes — particularly for the middle class — aren’t rising very much.
“This was a remarkable contribution to the public’s well-being over a relatively short number of years,
and yet this part of the contribution of the new product is not reflected in real output or real growth of G. D.P.,” he said.
“I think the official data on real growth substantially underestimates the rate of growth,” said Martin Feldstein, an economist at Harvard.
That, he said, “reduces people’s faith in the political and economic system.”
“I think it creates pessimism and a distrust of government,” leading Americans to worry
that “their children are going to be stuck and won’t be able to enjoy upward mobility,” he said.
As the economy has shifted from one that primarily produced things — refrigerators and cars, guns and shoes — to one
that now deals largely in services and information, economists have grown more and more skeptical that the traditional measure of gross domestic product — the nation’s total output — is accurately capturing much of the economy’s innovation and improvements.
