The U.S. economy has a number of problems that limit our growth, but some of them are a result of being a wealthy economy and placing other values above money. GDP, inflation adjusted, grew at an annualized rate of three percent or a little more, until the latest recession. Since then, growth has averaged just 1.3 percent, the worst performance after adjusting for the business cycle. (Details at the end of this article.) Productivity growth has been low, meaning not much improvement in output per worker. And the percentage of people who choose to work or look for work has declined, as documented in a White House report.

For perspective, note that an economy has both a long-run trend and cyclical fluctuations around that trend. The U.S. economy has recovered from its last recession, but the long-run trend looks lower than in past decades.

Three limitations on economic growth clearly come from the choices made within a wealthy economy: workplace safety, labor force participation, and geographic mobility.

Workplace Safety.  A safer workplace often produces less output per hour worked. And our workplaces have been getting safer as measured by fatal work injuries. A decade ago 4.2 workers died on the job for every 100,000 full-time equivalent workers. More recently, only 3.4 died on the job, a 19 percent reduction. That’s pretty significant, a saving of 1,138 lives annually compared to 2006. Some productivity reduction is quite likely caused by safety efforts. However, we place a high value on worker safety. People who have visited work sites in less developed countries report much less concern for worker safety. The American willingness to reduce productivity in order to improve safety is the choice of a wealthy people.

Labor Force Participation. The other side of the productivity issue is the number of people working. Some but not all of the decline is associated with disability. Alan B. Krueger has found that “… about half of prime age men who are not in the labor force may have a serious health condition that is a barrier to work.” In a poorer era, many of these men might have gone to work despite pain, even intense pain, when they saw few alternatives to providing for their families. As our social safety net has expanded, many of them can stay home instead.

Geographic Mobility. Finally, economists often wonder why people who are unemployed or underemployed don’t move away from poor areas. That issue impacts both productivity and workforce participation. Some people stay in a poor area, working at a low-productivity, low wage job when they could have a better job in a different city. Others don’t work at all. This isn’t good for overall economic growth, but it may be another sign of a wealthy country.

Geographic mobility has dropped in recent decades, according to the Census Bureau. At the same time, unemployment rates by metropolitan area vary widely, such as a high of 20.3 percent in El Centro, California and a low of 1.7 percent in Ames, Iowa in the most recent data. So why don’t unemployed people move to areas with tight labor markets? Historically we’ve had plenty of migration for economic opportunity. The westward expansion is one, the Great Migration of African-Americans from the south to the north was another. The answer seems to be that migration has social costs. People may have to leave behind their extended families and long-time friends. In a wealthy society, they can make the choice to stay behind, drawing on the social safety net and the earnings of other family members. In a poorer society, people would move so that they could feed themselves and their immediate family.

The Outlook for Economic Growth. Adam Smith pointed out that the point of an economy is to satisfy consumer wants, not to amass money. If we choose to live a more comfortable life at a lower standard of living, who is to say that’s wrong? The problem with that argument is that “we” are not making a choice; individuals make choices. When choices impose burdens on others, the real tradeoffs at work in the economy are hidden.

Workplace safety is an example of a good shift in costs and choices. The greatest improvement was not motivated by OSHA rules so much as worker compensation costs. Employers cover the costs of workplace injuries and thus have a large incentive to provide a safe workplace. The system isn’t perfect but it has driven down the incidence of death and injury on the job.

Support for disabled workers is more of a mixed bag. Many people are better off overall working in pain than staying home. Jobs provide a sense of accomplishment as well as social interaction. On the other hand, there are certainly cases in which physical pain exceeds the benefits of working. Our current system tends to socialize the monetary costs of supporting disabled workers, encouraging people at the margin to not work. Payments to injured or disabled people independent of work would properly align incentives for workers.

Reduced geographic mobility is certainly a loser for the economy as a whole. Well-intentioned supports for unemployed workers become a subsidy to those who prefer to stay in their communities. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a person choosing a lower-paying job in order to stay in the home town, but it’s not good for that choice to be subsidized by others who made the choice to be more economically productive.

From a forecasting perspective, it’s unlikely that these trends will change. As job markets improve, a few more injured people will work, and more people will move to economically vibrant cities, but these will be small changes. As a result, look for today’s slower pace of economic growth to continue.

(Details on cyclical adjustment. To avoid the effects of business cycles, I calculated growth of inflation-adjusted gross domestic product from the peak of one business cycle to the peak of the next. The peaks are determined by the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit organization generally recognized as the definitive source of business cycle dates. Growth was calculated with the compound average growth rate. For the most recent cycle, growth was calculated from the previous peak to the most recent quarter for which data are available, 2016q3. It has been a long enough expansion that if growth were to be stronger we would have seen it by now. The expansion from July 1980 to July 1981 was the shortest on record, and the economy had not fully recovered when the next recession hit, arguing for omitting this observation. However, our experience from the last peak in December 2007 through the most recent data is even worse than that one.)