Tip of the hat to Tyler Cowen at the Upshot for flagging Chad Syverson's excellent paper on the productivity slowdown. The slowdown in productivity growth over the past decade in the US and across the industrialized world is by now widely recognized. Many skeptics---especially on the West Coast---have speculated that the measured slowdown is merely the effect of mismeasurement of value-added in the new digital economy. That is, since the Internet is largely free, GDP does not capture the enormous gains in welfare from recent advances such as smartphones, social media, and so on. Syverson calls it the Mismeasurement Hypothesis (MH).
The Productivity Slowdown is Serious
The Productivity Slowdown is Serious
The Productivity Slowdown is Serious
Tip of the hat to Tyler Cowen at the Upshot for flagging Chad Syverson's excellent paper on the productivity slowdown. The slowdown in productivity growth over the past decade in the US and across the industrialized world is by now widely recognized. Many skeptics---especially on the West Coast---have speculated that the measured slowdown is merely the effect of mismeasurement of value-added in the new digital economy. That is, since the Internet is largely free, GDP does not capture the enormous gains in welfare from recent advances such as smartphones, social media, and so on. Syverson calls it the Mismeasurement Hypothesis (MH).