The above chart actually understates how lousy official US productivity numbers have been in recent years. Since the Great Recession, productivity has pretty much flatlined, up just 0.5% annually.
But how do you sync those numbers with what’s been happening in Silicon Valley? One theory is that we’ve been mismeasuring the digital economy and thus overall productivity and economic growth. I’ve written much about the version of this argument coming from Goldman Sachs. Yet respected new research from both the San Francisco Fed and the University of Chicago make a strong case that mismeasurement cannot explain the productivity slowdown.
Image: https://www.aei.org
