The last graph I saw showed American productivity going up at the same rate all since post-WWII to now.
Please don’t say that the stagnation refers to worker wages starting to stagnate sometime in the 1970’s.
By all measures I’ve seen, “productivity” has almost doubled, and it’s wage growth that has been flat.
How does this journal measure productivity?
This is the conundrum of productivity.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-major-occupational-gro...
One of the things that economic demographers like to mutter about from time to time is that lifespan is going up, but healthspan is not. Women live longer than men, but approximately all of the extra is spent in a state of ill health.
What there were not, was lots of people on oxygen or in wheelchairs or on dialysis or taking insulin daily. Lifespan is going up because we are keeping sick people alive for longer.
It's not wrong, but also there's a strange sort of value judgment hidden within the phrasing, and maybe within yours as well. We seem to be saying that this sort of growth is bad, or at least inferior to the kind where more "Stuff" is made. The article even directly refers to healthcare as "unproductive." It doesn't FEEL unproductive to the people who get to live longer, happier lives.
Locke was thinking in agrarian terms, about how farmers work the land, or how many ships a nation has in its fleet - he was building off the mercantilism of prior centuries which was also balance-sheet driven, but in a pure trading sense, with no connection between labor/ownership. That connection was important to ushering in coherent industrial policy, since it expressed the idea of importing raw materials and then exporting finished ones at a profit - when you come up with new categories of asset to sell, or optimizations on existing ones, the economy provides more goods and services, it experiences a gain in material wealth. The real limitation is that it's too localized: commons goods are persistently attacked by it because they don't figure into the balance sheet.
Locke can be forgiven, but his modern disciples less so.
*EDIT* To clarify, we can be economically more productive without physically manufacturing more widgets. Physical junk is only one small part of the economy.
Over 80% of the economy is services - healthcare, education, law, banking, insurance, real estate, X as a Service, marketing, engineering design, sales, trucking (yes, moving stuff around is a service), construction (yes, piling stuff up so it doesn't fall down is a service).
Basically all of things are more profitable because of Chinese inputs though? Remember what happened during Covid when most of the world ran out of PPE except China?
So USA healthcare might be more productive, but it's more productive and therefore more lucrative because of China's productivity boosts.
It doesn't discuss some of the biggest bubbles, those in housing. The US, Japan, and China have all had housing and land price bubbles. They unwound in different ways. In the US it was primarily a credit bubble. Japan had a huge real estate bubble, and it collapsed so hard that the Nikkei index didn't recover for decades.
China's bubble resulted in large numbers of half-finished buildings. That's because China allows selling yet-to-be-built mortgaged apartments to consumers. In the US, you have to get construction financing at a higher rate, and can only get a mortgage on a completed structure. Banks that do construction financing pay out as work progresses, not all up front.
Fracking isn't a bubble. Fracking is a cost reduction technology in an existing market. No need to create a market.
Railways had the "railway mania" period, but track was laid and trains were run. More like a growth spurt than a bubble.
The resulting infrastructure created a lot of value for the UK (similar to the 90s telecom bubble in the US and Canada), but there was definitely a crash that destroyed a lot of people's bank accounts and represented a big dip in the value of the market.
Fracking certainly is a technology, but the author is using the word to describe the very real market bubble that popped in 2016-2017. It wasn’t as apparent in the public markets (and it is no surprise why you may not have noticed it) but several private operators spent far in excess of generated cash flow, ran out of cash and defaulted. In turn, many of their private equity sponsors blew up or left the space.
FWIW, Cowan wrote an enthusiastic blurb for Boom.
For one, they want to establish "Constitution Free Zones" outside of democratic control of nation states. All to create tax havens and increase their own profits.
These are scam artists. Reject them and their self-serving "vision of the future". You all are being had because you refuse to read history books.
Multicomp•8mo ago
While Windows of today is deceptive and buggy, the value that it has is because it still has pieces of that now discarded design philosophy.
Zooming out from a particular technology platform, I don't know how to build that new lunar society but boy do I want to live in that world, innovation for its own sake to increase human flourishing so that we can all live the good life in a human focused technologically advanced world.
In short: building the sci Fi flying cars future.