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製作日期:2012.9.24

Our New (Not So) Productive Economy

Government, Health Care, and Education

If productivity is going up, if we are doing more, getting more,

with less, then things can’t be all that bad. Right?

Productivity statistics over the last few decades apparently offer

hope. Productivity is quite slow from 1973 to the mid-1990s, but

after then, we see some spurts. For instance, measured

productivity rises at 2.8 percent a year from 1996 to 2000. From

J 2000 to 2004, there is a second surge, with an even higher

average of 3.8 percent productivity growth. That hardly seems

like a total failure.

Nonetheless, I have come to fear that the productivity statistics,

and the national income statistics, are misleading us. It’s quite

possible that actual productivity and actual GDP haven’t been

going up as much as the published numbers make it seem. I

don’t mean to deny the productivity gains where we find them,

such as in information technology, but I fear that those gains are

being offset by productivity losses elsewhere in the economy. A

simple example: In 2005, iinance accounted for 8 percent of

U.S. GDP, and that figure had been rising throughout the 2000-

2004 “productivity boom” period. I know what the numbers say,

but what was the financial sector really producing during those

years? The published figures do not pick up the problematic

nature of financial sector growth, which of course culminated in

a major crash. What we measured as value creation actually may

have been value destruction, namely too many homes and too

much financial innovation of the wrong kind.

Keep in mind that median income growth has been slow, and

stock prices-the valuation of capital-haven't made lasting

progress in a long time. As of the fall of 2010, the S&P 500 is

more or less back where it had been in the mid-1990s. As

economist Michael Mandel puts it, if neither labor nor capital is

reaping much gain, can we really trust the productivity

numbers?