Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Well That Explains That: Productivity Edition (plus dragons)

From FT Alphaville: 
 
Why don’t computers work?
A neat theory to explain the productivity puzzle 2.0

[It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife]
(sorry, Bryce tripped my Jane Austen trigger, without warning. back to FTAV)

It’s a well-researched oddity of the past few decades is that as technology gets faster, people get slower. Digitisation of the workforce has failed to do what it promised and there’s no agreement as to why. 

Economist Robert Solow summarised the problem in 1987, saying: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Data keep on proving his point. All measures of IT spending have kept trending higher yet since 2005, rates of labour productivity growth at least halved in the US, UK, Japan, Germany and France....

....MUCH MORE