In this essay we reflect on the relevance of early twentieth century American experience for understanding the more general phenomenon of recurring prolonged swings in the TFP growth rate in advanced industrial economies. After a productivity pause of some three decades, during which gross manufacturing output in the US grew at less than one percent per annum relative to inputs of capital and labor, TFP in this sector expanded at more than five percent per annum between 1919 and 1929. This

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... kable discontinuity has largely been overlooked by modern productivity analysts and economic historians alike; yet it contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the US domestic economy s TFP residual, and in many respects may be seen as the opening of the high-growth era that persisted into the 1970s. 1 The shift in the underlying technological regime that is implied by this statistically documented discontinuity can be traced to critical engineering and organizational advances connected with the electrification of industry. These developments marked the culminating phase in the diffusion of "the dynamo" as a general purpose technology (GPT) that made possible significant fixed-capital savings, while simultaneously increasing labor productivity. Yet, a narrow technological explanation of the post-World War I industrial productivity surge proves to be 1 This paper builds upon the detailed re-examination of manufacturing productivity in David and Wright, "Early Twentieth Century Growth Dynamics." We are grateful to Sir John Habakkuk, Angus Maddison, and R.C.O. Matthews for their comments and suggestions on a previous draft. 2 inadequate. It neglects the concurrence of those developments with important structural changes in US labor markets, and fails to do justice to the significance of complementarities that emerged between managerial and organizational innovations and the new dynamo-based factory technology, on the one hand, and, on the other, between both forms of innovation and the macroeconomic conditions of the 1920s. We explore the latter, more complex formulation of the dynamics of GPT diffusion by considering the generic and the differentiating aspects of the US experience with industrial electrification in comparison with that of the UK and Japan. The crossnational perspective brings to light some differences between leader and follower economies in the dynamics of GPT diffusion, and its relationship to the strength of surges in productivity growth. Our Anglo-American comparison serves also to underscore the important role of the institutional and policy context with respect to the potential for upgrading the quality of the workforce in the immediately affected branches of industry. The concluding sections of the essay offer some reflections on the analogies and contrasts between the historical case of a socio-economic regime transition involving the electric dynamo and the modern experience of the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution. Contextualizing the GPT concept in explicitly historical terms sheds light on the paradoxical phenomenon of the late twentieth century productivity slowdown, and also points to some contemporary portents of a future phase of more rapid ICT-based growth in total factor productivity. A Brief Recapitulation 3