A "Singular Experience of Economic Growth"

"Instead of permanent stagnation, growth became so rapid and so seemingly automatic that by the fifties and sixties the average American would roughly double his or her parents' standard of living. In the space of a single generation, for most everybody, life was getting twice as good.
"At some point in the late sixties or early seventies, this great acceleration began to taper off. The shift was modest at first, and it was concealed in the hectic up-and-down of yearly data. But if you examine the growth data since the early seventies, and if you are mathematically astute enough to fit a curve to it, you can see a clear trend: The rate at which life is improving here, on the frontier of human well-being, has slowed."

In a 2013 New York article, Benjamin Wallace-Wells explores if "the rate of improvement in the standard of living—[,] year over year, and generation after generation­—[,] will be no faster than it was during the dark ages."