What to Make of Productivity Paradoxes

Technical innovations transform our everyday lives at a seemingly breathless pace. Pundits wonder when human labor will soon be made redundant by robots. Yet productivity growth is slowing down almost everywhere. According to the latest report by the Conference Board, a business research group, overall efficiency in production – a measure of technical progress that economists call total factor productivity – grew at 1.3 percent per year globally between 1999 and 2006, but its pace slowed down to a meager 0.3 percent from 2007 to 2014. Put differently, efficiency in the use of worldwide capital and labor was only 2 percent higher in 2014 than seven years before, whereas it increased by 9.4 percent over the course of the seven preceding years. More...