Discussing Productivity at the OECD
European Straits #43
Dear all,
I’m sure many of you are familiar with Robert Solow’s famous quote on computers and productivity:
“What everyone feels to have been a technological revolution, a drastic change in our productive lives, has been accompanied everywhere, including Japan, by a slowing-down of productivity growth, not by a step up. You can see the computer age but in the productivity statistics.”
The idea has become something of a cliche, yet it is still very much present in the discussion on where exactly the global economy is headed.
For me, the latest example was seen this past Monday at the Château de la Muette in Paris, where I participated in a day-long meeting of the Expert Advisory Group for the OECD’s Going Digital project. Indeed productivity was on the agenda of this meeting. But as there was not much room to dig into it, I thought I would use this newsletter to elaborate on a few ideas and point out interesting sources:
Productivity is the result of combining ability with pressure. Technol…