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posted by on Monday December 19 2016, @01:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the yes-but-how-do-we-make-america-great-again? dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

This report from Gallup and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, "An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline" was released last week as a 120 page pdf. Here is the table of contents:

01. THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM
02. WHY IS GROWTH DOWN?
03. UNDERSTANDING GDP GROWTH
04. THE KEY SECTORS DRAGGING DOWN GROWTH
05. HEALTHCARE
06. HOUSING
07. EDUCATION
08. POSSIBLE INDIRECT CONSEQUENCES OF ECONOMIC DETERIORATION
09. WHAT IS CAUSING ECONOMIC DETERIORATION?
10. REVIVING GROWTH WILL REQUIRE A NEW STRATEGY
ENDNOTES

Now being reviewed by various pundits, for example, Robert Samuelson's take:

A huge part of the productivity slowdown, Rothwell contends, is the poor performance of these three large sectors of the economy: health care, education and housing. These sectors have gotten bigger, he says, without getting more productive. As their costs escalate, they absorb more of families' incomes, making it harder to satisfy other wants.

[...] Everyone knows about rising health costs, including higher insurance deductibles and co-payments. The same thing is happening in the other sectors. From 1980 to 2014, median rent for families rose from 19 percent of income to 28 percent, Rothwell says. During the same years, homeowners' mortgage costs went from 12 percent to 16 percent of income.

Likewise, costs for K-12 public schools, after adjusting for inflation, jumped 74 percent between 1980 and 2013. College tuition has also soared.

If these price increases had been accompanied by dramatic improvements in quality and value — that is, productivity gains — they might be easily explained. But Rothwell doubts this. Gains in life expectancy have been modest, he says. Despite higher rents, the median size of rental units has declined about a fifth since 1980. Scores on standardized tests have remained roughly stable since the early 1970s.


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  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @01:43AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @01:43AM (#442895)

    Really, you will think I am kidding, but all this stuff needs an "rationale" these days to get through the door. NHST is how it is provided currently, maybe they will turn to something else when we finally stop allowing pseudoscience to guide public policy, but for now we should point the finger at this means of justifying infinite waste: http://lesswrong.com/lw/g13/against_nhst/ [lesswrong.com]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @02:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @02:35AM (#442914)

    You're not kidding? OK, so are you the Flat Earth AC, or the Electric Universe AC? I'll bet that they laughed at the Academy when you presented your findings on the NHST, didn't they?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @02:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @02:42AM (#442918)

      Nope, they didn't use more than the most basic math or logic there so just assumed it was wrong somehow and went back to their ways.

  • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Monday December 19 2016, @09:24AM

    by davester666 (155) on Monday December 19 2016, @09:24AM (#443034)

    Pretty much everything except maybe k-12 schools, the "productivity slowdown" is effectively just more and more profit being demanded.