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Can't point to hard data, but as I lived through 2000s and 2010s in Turkey I can definitely say people had quite a lot of optimism about the future roughly between 2005-2015. Combination of strong economic growth as well as a positive ideological framework for the future changes (increasing liberalism and EU membership in our case) can really work some serious magic.
Both of factors basically disappeared since in most of the world. Few countries have experienced significant consistent economic growth in the last decade (China, US and Israel as exceptions), let alone productivity growth. Also neo-liberal borderless capitalism and almost limitless human liberty through internet does not function as the great ideology of the age as it used to anymore. The economic crash killed the belief in the first and the Arab Spring in the second.
Yup. Ex-US market have lagged big time since since 2010, such as in terms of stock market gains, GDP, innovation, etc. See no reason for this to improve. 2002-2010 was an outlier that will likely not be repeated. It does also call into doubt the Keynesian assumption that you can print your way to prosperity; except for the US, this has failed.
Even in the US, the macroeconomic policies of the 2010s were closer to monetarism than Keynesianism. Obama brought down the defict, the Fed kept broad money and nominal GDP growing at a very steady rate, and the economy did ok in spite of greater regulatory/tax burdens during than e.g. the 1990s boom.
In terms of growth, there has been a general movement in the developed world away from economic freedom since about 2000, and I don't think there's much to be explained once this + demographics are accounted for. The crises of the 1970s and 1980s temporarily made it politically profitable for politicians to pursue pro-growth policies, in spite of the fact that these tend to go against well-organised special interest groups, but once this had suceeded, the tendencies identified by public choice theory reasserted themselves: more taxes, more spending, and more regulation. Leviathan went on a crash diet, but he's now gorging again, and the consequence is stagnation, especially in the hyper-cautious and social democratic world of the EU, which has seen more or less no per capita GDP growth since 2007.
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Ex-big tech has lagged. If you look at the same kind of stocks in other indexes - banks, cyclicals, etc the US has not done that well.
It’s something something quit enforcing monopoly laws allowing big tech to capture economic rents and develop market caps never seen before.
Networks effects and moats. These cannot be fixed with regulation but are intrinsic to the type of technology . Having total market dominance is not the same as uncompetitive behavior.
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Yes looks like the system is quite stuck and individual small countries are also stuck playing a game which is not working well for them anymore. I found Michael Pettis' work quite enlightening and interesting in this subject: https://americancompass.org/bad-trade and also the theories that relate developmental stall to deindustrialization https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/the-long-slow-death-of-global-development. I believe the two ideas work well together to explain quite a lot. But I am not an economist.
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