Manufacturer Wages During The Great Depression

The State of American Productivity Growth

Download this snapshot (pdf)

Read this snapshot in your web browser

Productivity growth—the rate at which we increase production with a given amount of work and resources—is at the heart of economic growth. It will be easier to address the myriad challenges facing the U.S. economy—increasingly fragile middle-class living standards, the long-term federal budget deficits, and increasing economic competition from rapidly developing countries—if productivity grows faster rather than slower and economic growth accelerates with it.

Productivity growth is critical to our national economic competitiveness. U.S. products and services are more competitive in the global marketplace when U.S. firms manage to produce more and better things with the same amount of inputs.

Productivity growth also boosts our future living standards. Simply put, productivity growth means we can have more goods and services available for a given amount of resources used—hours at work, in particular. Because productivity growth makes our work go further, the average standard of living can rise more quickly. To ensure broadly shared prosperity we still need to address how the gains from productivity growth are distributed between wages and profits, but we can't forget that rising prosperity begins with strong and sustained productivity growth.

A number of key factors come into play in determining faster productivity growth in the future. These include the level of business investment, the availability of skilled workers, spending on research and development, and adequate financing for bringing new and innovative products to market. The indicators of U.S. productivity and innovation surveyed here raise a number of points of concern about the future of U.S. economic competitiveness and living standards:

Alfred and Mary Marshall and the Confidence Fairy: Annals of the ...

The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college next year, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities is now strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.

(4) After every crisis, in every period of commercial depression, it is said that supply is in excess of demand. Of course there may easily be an excessive supply of some particular commodities; so much cloth and furniture and cutlery may have been made that they cannot be sold at a remunerative price. But something more than this is meant. For after a crisis the warehouses are overstocked with goods in almost every important trade; scarcely any trade can continue undiminished production so as to afford a good rate of profits to capital and a good rate of wages to labour. And it is thought that this state of things is one of general over-production. We shall however find that it really is nothing but a state of commercial disorganization; and that the remedy for it is a revival of confidence.

To begin with, it is clear that, as [John Stuart] Mill says:

What constitutes the means of payment for commodities is simply commodities. Each person's means of paying for the productions of other people consist of those which he himself possesses. All sellers are inevitably, and by the meaning of the word, buyers. Could we suddenly double the productive powers of the country, we should double the supply of commodities in every market; but we should, by the same stroke, double the purchasing power. Everybody would bring a double demand as well as supply; everybody would be able to buy twice as much, because every one would have twice as much to offer in exchange.

The Great Gatsby

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The kite runner

The Help

The Handmaid's Tale