Mr. Furman said that Americans were feeling a genuine slowdown in growth, but aggravating the impact was<br />that the growth that had occurred “is less equally shared than before.”<br />For Mr. Feldstein, it is misleading measurements that are contributing to a public perception<br />that real incomes — particularly for the middle class — aren’t rising very much.<br />“This was a remarkable contribution to the public’s well-being over a relatively short number of years,<br />and yet this part of the contribution of the new product is not reflected in real output or real growth of G. D.P.,” he said.<br />“I think the official data on real growth substantially underestimates the rate of growth,” said Martin Feldstein, an economist at Harvard.<br />That, he said, “reduces people’s faith in the political and economic system.”<br />“I think it creates pessimism and a distrust of government,” leading Americans to worry<br />that “their children are going to be stuck and won’t be able to enjoy upward mobility,” he said.<br />As the economy has shifted from one that primarily produced things — refrigerators and cars, guns and shoes — to one<br />that now deals largely in services and information, economists have grown more and more skeptical that the traditional measure of gross domestic product — the nation’s total output — is accurately capturing much of the economy’s innovation and improvements.
