Our tech advances are difficult for productivity stats to compute
Our productivity measure hasn t caught up with new technology (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)
One of the most depressing aspects of the decade of the 2010s, well before Covid-19 struck, was the apparently very slow growth in productivity.
This is not a mere ivory tower issue. It is only through increasing productivity that rises in living standards can be sustained. Productivity is the key measure of the efficiency of the economy.
On an everyday level, the previous decade seems to have witnessed a surge in innovative ways of doing things. Companies like Amazon and Netflix make life easier, more enjoyable. Computing power has made dramatic advances. In the past few years, there have been major new developments in the science of artificial intelligence.