Because the Trump team insisted that a roaring recovery was coming, and refused to notice that it wasn’t happening, we’ve now stumbled into a complet… - Paul Krugman

If growth in East Asia is indeed running into diminishing returns, however, the conventional wisdom about an Asian-centered world economy needs some rethinking.

There are many economic puzzles, but there are only two really great mysteries.
One of these mysteries is why economic growth takes places at different rates over time and across countries. Nobody really knows why the U.S. economy could generate 3 percent annual productivity growth before 1973 but only 1 percent afterward, nobody really knows why Japan surged from defeat to global economic power after World War II, while Britain slid slowly into third-rate status. At any given time there are always policy entrepreneurs willing to claim that they have all the answers, but we'll come to that story in later chapters.
The other mystery is the reason why there is a business cycle ― the irregular rhythm of recessions and recoveries that prevents economic growth from being a smooth trend. It was in challenging the orthodox, Keynesian view of business cycles that conservatives first forced a major rethinking of economics.

The history of of the study of the location of economic activity is more like the story of geological thought about the shapes and location of continents and mountain ranges. The location of production is an obvious feature of the economic world. Indeed, I began to get interested in economics as a schoolchild by looking at those old-fashioned maps of countries that used picturesque symbols to represent economic activity: sheaves of wheat to represent agriculture, little miners' carts to represent resource extraction, little factories to represent industry, and so on. And yet there is almost no spatial analysis in mainstream economics.