Peter Coy, Columnist

The Postwar Boom Isn’t Coming Back Anytime Soon

Trump says we can hit 6 percent growth. Economist Marc Levinson says we can’t.

November 3, 2016 at 10:00 AM UTC

Peter Coy is the economics editor for Bloomberg Businessweek and covers a wide range of economic issues. He also holds the position of senior writer. Coy joined the magazine in December 1989 as telecommunications editor, then became technology editor in October 1992 and held that position until joining the economics staff. He came to BusinessWeek from the Associated Press in New York, where he had served as a business news writer since 1985. Before that, Coy worked as a correspondent in the AP Rochester bureau. He began his career at the AP in 1980 as an editor in the Albany bureau. Prior to that, Coy was a reporter for the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican. Coy holds a BA in history from Cornell University.

1478112197_etc_critic46-1 — Illustration: Paweł Mildner

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This article is part of the November 7, 2016 issue of businessweek.

In 1973, when Barbra Streisand starred with Robert Redford in The Way We Were, she sang longingly about “misty watercolor memories.” In retrospect, 1973 itself was a year to remember. It was the end of a golden era—a period of rapid growth in productivity and living standards that had no predecessor and hasn’t been repeated.

In An Extraordinary Time, economist and journalist Marc Levinson says the good times are over for good, or at least for the foreseeable future. The boom from 1948 to ’73 was extraordinary. What we have now, his subtitle asserts, is “the return of the ordinary economy.”