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13 May 09
jaimecidMany observers of recent trends in the industrialized economies of the West have been perplexed by the conjecture of rapid technological innovation with disappointingly slow gains in measured productivity.
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07 Apr 08
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The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox
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Many observers of recent trends in the industrialized economies of the West have been perplexed by the conjecture of rapid technological innovation with disappointingly slow gains in measured productivity. A generation of economists who were brought up to identify increases in total factor productivity indexes with “technical progress” has found it quite paradoxical for the growth accountants’ residual measure of “the advance of knowledge” to have vanished at the very same time that a wave of major innovations was appearing - in microelectronics, in communications technologies based on lasers and fiber optics, in composite materials, and in biotechnology.
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Disappointments with “the computer revolution” and the newly dawned “information age” in this regard have been keenly felt. Indeed, the notion that there is something anomalous about the prevailing state of affairs has drawn much of its appeal from the apparent failure of the wave of innovations based on the microprocessor and the memory chip to elicit a surge of growth in productivity from the sectors of the U.S. economy that recently have been investing so heavily in electronic data processing equipment (see, for example, Stephen Roach, 1987, 1988; Martin Baily and Robert Gordon, 1988).
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This latter aspect of the so-called “productivity paradox” attained popular currency in the succinct formulation attributed to Robert Solow: “We see the computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
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