Tom L.
Doug Henwood wrote:
> In his paper "Current Productivity Puzzles from a Long-Term
> Perspective"
> <http://faculty-web.at.nwu.edu/economics/gordon/338.html>, Robert J
> Gordon writes:
>
> "The next section distinguishes the growth rates of
> quality-unadjusted hours of labor input (as used in Table 1) from the
> quality-adjusted growth rates that include the effects of changing
> composition across education, experience, and gender categories.
> During 1964-79 it appears that the benefits of increasing educational
> attainment were cancelled out by a shift toward less experienced
> teenagers and the rapid inflow of females into the labor force. After
> 1979 the share of teenagers declined and the female labor force
> participation rate levelled off, allowing the positive impact of
> increasing educational attainment to be augmented by a slight
> increase in workforce experience."
>
> I can understand how education and experience enter into this model,
> but what is it about being specifically female that implies a
> lessening LF quality? Does anyone know the history of this and
> whether it's controversial in the trade? It seem outrageous on the
> face of it.
>
> Later, Gordon writes (his big wave is the rise in U.S. productivity
> between 1913 and 1964 - peaking 1928-50 - and its subsequent fall
> (not reversed in recent years by computers):
>
> "Immigration and the co-dependence of Productivity and Real Wages.
> Given the timing of the 'big wave,' it is striking that productivity
> growth was slow in the late nineteenth century when immigration was
> important, and then again in the 1970s and 1980s when the baby boom
> and renewed immigration created rapid labor-force growth. This
> observation is related to Romer's (1987, Figure 1) demonstration that
> productivity growth and labor-force growth in U. S. history is
> negatively correlated over 20-year intervals since 1839. Thinking
> about immigration may be helpful in explaining why the U. S. MFP
> growth slowdown in the 1970-90 period has been concentrated in
> nonmanufacturing. My idea (further developed in Gordon, 1997) is that
> new entrants (teens and adult females in the 1970s and legal and
> illegal immigrants in the 1980s) have mainly gone into unskilled
> service jobs and have held down the real wage in services, in turn
> promoting the lavish use of unskilled labor in such occupations as
> grocery baggers, busboys, valet parkers, and parking lot attendants,
> jobs that barely exist in high-wage European economies. In contrast,
> immigrants in the 1890-1913 period were disproportionately employed
> in manufacturing, and their prescence probably dampened real wage
> increases and delayed the introduction of labor-saving equipment. The
> 'big 22 wave' period of rapid productivity growth coincides roughly
> with the shutting off of mass immigration in the 1920s and the slow
> labor-force growth of 1930-65."
>
> Any thoughts on this?