Print this article Tyler Cowen, riffing on Michael Mandel’s suggestion that the main economic problem facing the United States is the “massive write-down of U.S. knowledge capital over the past 10-15 years, combined with anti-innovation policies on the part of the government,” offers an intriguing hypothesis: I sometimes think of an imaginary economy with two sectors: music and bathtubs. I believe that my bathtub is over thirty years old, yet for me it works fine and I have no desire to buy a new one. When it comes to music, most people want to listen to what is new and hot, not Bach’s B Minor Mass.