Syverson On The Productivity Slowdown - Barokong

Chad Syverson has an interesting new paper on the sources of the productivity slowdown. Background to wake you up: Long-term US growth is slowing down. This is a (the!) big important issue in economics (one previous post).  And productivity -- how much each person can produce per hour -- is the only source of long-term growth. We are not vastly better off than our grandparents because we negotiated better wages for hacking at coal with pickaxes. Why is productivity slowing down? Perhaps we've run out of ideas (Gordon). Perhaps a savings glut and the  zero bound drive secular stagnation lack of demand (Summers). Perhaps the out of control regulatory leviathan is killing growth with a thousand cuts (Cochrane). Or maybe productivity  isn't declining at all, we're just measuring new products badly (Varian; Silicon Valley). Google maps is free! If so, we are living with undiagnosed but healthy deflation, and real GDP growth is actually doing well. Chad: First, the productivity slowdown has occurred in dozens of countries, and its size is unrelated to measures of the countries’ consumption or production intensities of information and communication technologies ... Second, estimates... of the surplus created by internet-linked digital technologies fall far short of the $2.7 trillion or more of “missing output” resulting from the productivity growth slowdown...Third, if measurement problems were to account for even a modest share of this missing output, the properly measured output and productivity growth rates of industries that produce and service ICTs [internet] would have to have been multiples of their measured growth in the data. Fourth, while measured gross domestic income has been on average higher than measured gross domestic product since 2004—perhaps indicating workers are being paid to make products that are given away for free or at highly discounted prices—this trend actually began before the productivity slowdown and moreover reflects unusually high capital income rather than labor income (i.e., profits are unusually high). In combination, these complementary facets of evidence suggest that the reasonable prima facie case for the mismeasurement hypothesis faces real hurdles when confronted with the data. An interesting read throughout. [Except for that last sentence, a near parody of academic caution!]
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