In the post-WW2 era, by many different measures the US economy performed better before about 1970 than after. You can apparently see this in many different statistics. For example, the productivity slowdown is a well-known and well-studied phenomenon. And even given the productivity slowdown, median wages don’t seem to have kept pace with productivity growth.
I think there are good reasons to doubt these particular statistics. For example, on wages and productivity see this working paper by Stansbury and Summers.
But even considering all these criticisms of the statistics, we do observe that overall GDP growth has been slower since about 1970. Why might this be?
In an NBER summary of his research, Nicholas Muller argues that a big part of the GDP growth slowdown is because we aren’t including environmental damage in the calculation. This is not a new argument (Muller is an important contributor to…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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