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The nonrivalry of ideas gives rise to increasing returns, a fact celebrated in Paul Romer's recent Nobel Prize. An implication is that the long-run rate of economic growth is the product of the degree of increasing returns and the growth rate of research effort; this is the essence of semi-endogenous growth theory. This paper interprets past and future growth from a semi-endogenous perspective. For 50+ years, U.S. growth has substantially exceeded its long-run rate because of rising educational attainment, declining misallocation, and rising (global) research intensity, implying that frontier growth could slow markedly in the future. Other forces push in the opposite direction. First is the prospect of "finding new Einsteins": how many talented researchers have we missed historically because of the underdevelopment of China and India and because of barriers that discouraged women inventors? Second is the longer-term prospect that artificial intelligence could augment or even replace people as researchers. Throughout, the paper highlights many opportunities for further research.

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We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans. Our statistic incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality, with mortality rates playing a key role quantitatively. According to our estimates, welfare for Black Americans was 43% of that for White Americans in 1984 and rose to 60% by 2019. Going back further in time (albeit with more limited data), the gap was even larger, with Black welfare equal to just 28% of White welfare in 1940. On the one hand, there has been remarkable progress for Black Americans: the level of their consumption-equivalent welfare increased by a factor of 28 between 1940 and 2019, when aggregate consumption per person rose a more modest 5-fold. On the other hand, despite this remarkable progress, the welfare gap in 2019 remains disconcertingly large. Mortality from COVID-19 has temporarily reversed a decade of progress, lowering Black welfare by 17% while reducing White welfare by 10%.