Always worth reading, Brad DeLong has a great post saying ‘After the Fall of Harvey Pitt: We Are Still in Bigger Trouble Than We Realize’, because of bogus corporate accounting and the bad investments it generated. There’s a striking contrast between the gloom of this piece along with another with reflections on the recent election outcome, and Brad’s buoyant techno-optimism. In particular, while lamenting bogus corporate accounts, Brad takes recent good productivity statistics pretty much at face value. I must admit I haven’t formulated a complete account of this issue, but I’m inherently suspicious of the idea that the blatantly stupid and corrupt investment decisions of the past decade or so could lay the basis for a sustained surge in productivity.