1. You don't measure productivity by the number of hours worked. There are just different cultural norms at play and it doesn't make sense.
2. Comparing an economy that started out with low productivity and grew quickly to an economy that started out with high productivity and grew more slowly isn't really telling me anything other than the low-productivity economy caught up. Which happens, because it's harder to push the frontier than follow in someone else's footsteps.
3. The effect of automation is very hard to quantify because it tends to displace low-skilled jobs that don't pay much in the first place. But the social impact of this is huge -- you take the people at the bottom of the economy and take away the only jobs that were accessible to them. Social unrest is inevitable. This will likely impact the economy in negative ways in years to come, and we need to understand this.
Anyway, all around a terrible article. The author has no grasp of basic economics and seems to have cherry picked statistics that he thinks back up his claims. Has anyone created a "top 10 logical fallacies of data analysis"? Because this article would tick all 10 of them.
The article doesn't. It measures productivity in terms of actual monetary value per worker and then compares it to the number of hours worked.
> The effect of automation is very hard to quantify because it tends to displace low-skilled jobs that don't pay much in the first place. But the social impact of this is huge -- you take the people at the bottom of the economy and take away the only jobs that were accessible to them. Social unrest is inevitable. This will likely impact the economy in negative ways in years to come, and we need to understand this.
Again, addressed by the article. Would you have considered milkmen or household servants high-skilled jobs? Both these jobs have been all but replaced for the majority of people, yet there wasn't that much social unrest when the refrigerator or washing machine was invented.