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1/ Singularly the best piece on economics I've seen this year. Won't be new if you know my work, but it's an essential point to understand. @nytimes nyti.ms/2CHSJz9
2/ A few companion charts. We can think of observed GDP growth as the sum of three components: labor force growth + trend productivity growth (which we call "structural") growth driven by demographics and long-term factors, and "cyclical" growth due to changes in unemployment. 
3/ So already, you'll notice that "structural" GDP growth is only running about 1.4% annually. That's where GDP growth is headed if declines in the unemployment rate merely stop. Let's look at the two pieces of structural growth. First, labor force growth is largely demographic..
4/ The other piece of structural GDP growth is trend productivity. Here's where there's some hope of sustaining growth, provided scarce savings are directed to productive uses. But even here a rebound to the highest growth in history wouldn't get us much past 3% structural.
5/ With regard to economic policy, I'm a little more optimistic than the @nytimes piece, but to the extent policy can do anything useful, it's to encourage the direction of scarce savings toward productive investment.
6/ U.S. policy makers have been doing none of that. QE doesn't increase productive investment and the long-term stream of value-added that can be consumed. Instead to juice the financial prices of stagnant cash flows by encouraging yield-seeking speculation.
7/ Similarly, good fiscal policy involves some combination of productive spending that's likely to justify itself over time (think infrastructure, clean energy, education) and tax incentives directly targeted at productive investment and R&D, not trickle-down giveaways. Again:
8/ Understand that Fed easing doesn't create "wealth," in aggregate. The wealth inherent in any security is in the cash flows that the security will deliver over time. Each security has to be held by *someone* until it's retired. Juicing valuations just creates bubbles & crashes.
