To start with, a confession: I downloaded Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation weeks ago and haven't yet read it, probably due to my psychological resistance to non-physical books. Maybe I should print it out, if the Kindle software permits that.

Anyway, the longer I leave it, the more thoughtful comments on it come my way. The latest (thanks to a pointer from @nevali) are from the blog of Timothy B Lee, who expresses in a most clear and articulate way my own gut response to what I had already heard of the book's argument, namely that Cowen seemed to be taking an implausibly narrow definition of the new technologies and their effects. There are two posts, well worth reading, here and here. These quotes sum up the argument:

Reading The Great Stagnation, one gets the impression that
someone making $50,000 in 2010 lived about as well as someone making
$50,000 in 1990 (in real dollars as computed by the BLS) except that the
guy in 2010 had more fun when he turned on his PC.
…
The low-hanging fruit of our generation is not just “the Internet,”
but software powered by Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law made the modern Internet possible, but it also gave birth to
the personal computer, various consumer electronics devices like iPods
and smart phones, electronic financial networks, medical breakthroughs
(e.g. medical imaging, computational genomics), and a vast array of
embedded systems (computerized fuel injection in cars, airplanes with
auto-pilot, industrial robots).
Looking at this list, it’s obvious that software innovation is not
necessarily (in Cowen’s words) “interior to the human mind rather than
set on a factory floor.”

All the more relevant on the day Intel announced its next step forward in microchip design.

I'm also very pleased to have discovered this blog, Bottom Up, which looks a great addition to the bookmarks. So thanks Mo!