An analysis from the NYT. Its not a new idea. Some argue that low growth and high debt will make politics in the next few decades far more difficult than in recent years. As if that's possible.
We typically blame Washington for not doing more to help the economy grow. But what if we have it backward: What if it is the weak economy that is driving the failures in Washington?
That is what Benjamin Friedman, a Harvard economist who has studied the way slow growth frays societies and strains politics, thinks. “We could be stuck in a trap,” he told me last week. “We could be stuck in a perverse equilibrium in which our absence of growth is delivering political paralysis, and the political paralysis preserves the absence of growth.”
