[lbo-talk] Productivity growth: comment on the conservative view

JOANNA A. 123hop at comcast.net
Wed Mar 9 17:19:15 PST 2016


Productivity quadrupled from 1980 to present, but wages stayed flat.

Fuck the NYT.

Joanna

----- Original Message ----- Tyler Cowan, writing in the NYT feature “The Upshot” dated March 4, 2016, opens his essay with this sentence:


> American middle class wages haven’t been rising as rapidly as they once were, and a slowdown in productivity growth is probably an important cause.

The reverse is obviously more correct:

If wages were rising for a time there would be more investment in labor-eliminating technology to fight wage gains, and the productivity number would be higher.

Productivity improvement has slowed because wages have stopped going up. Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowan are wrong.

Gene

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