OREANDA-NEWS. February 18, 2015. The potential boost to economic growth from new technologies may be blunted in the future by problems such as growing inequality, lack of investment and increased short-termism, the Bank of England's chief economist said on Tuesday.

In a speech, Andy Haldane said technological progress offered strong grounds for expecting that rapid economic growth would resume after the damage done by the global financial crisis.

But technological advance increasingly meant that skilled jobs were being made redundant by computerisation. Rising levels of economic inequality were also linked with academic underperformance by poorer children, he said.

"They could jeopardise the promise of the fourth industrial revolution. Pessimists' concerns would be warranted," Haldane said in a speech to the University of East Anglia in Norwich, eastern England.

He said inequality in the United States might have stunted past U.S. economic growth to the tune of almost one percentage point each year.

"In an era of low growth, that is a strikingly strong headwind from lower levels of social capital."

Haldane said the abundance of information available on the Internet could also be shortening people's attention spans, creating a trend towards greater short-termism that reduced the desire to invest and the ability to innovate.

"We have fear about secular stagnation at the same time as cheer about secular innovation. The technological tailwinds to growth are strong, but so too are the sociological headwinds," he said. "Future growth risks becoming suspended between the mundane and the miraculous."