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.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday December 19 2016, @02:05PM
What is a better measure than GDP?
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday December 19 2016, @02:49PM
What is a better measure than GDP?
The "income" line of a balance sheet? Let "Our Country, Inc." have a balance sheet at the New Year's Eve. Look at the difference between years. Of course, this would run into problems with like how you factor in, say, a cinema visit, where an intangible good provides a benefit (good movie) or damage (bad movie) to the populace; but after the bubble economy burst, there are already rules in place how to evaluate such stuff. At least, where it matters to investors, anyway. And making or reading such a balance sheet is no worse than having all the "(intentionally) broken window" value in the GDP calculation either.
(Score: 1) by Z-A,z-a,01234 on Monday December 19 2016, @03:33PM
GDP also includes "productive" activities like: anything bought/sold on the stock market, anything "value added" by intermediaries, insurance, etc.
In a different line of thought: is it a "productive" activity to buy / sell art? Or second-hand and collectible things? I think not.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 19 2016, @03:37PM
As a thought experiment maybe bean counting has no place in economic study.
Consider what beans we'd count to believe in a religion, for example.
Or what beans would we count to measure progress in AI or the ethics of nanotechnology?
You could argue that modern economics is mostly propaganda for a "gray goo nanotechnology disaster".
Not even saying I agree with that thought experiment in that some things like competitive industrial or regulated public utility commodity processes naturally lend themselves to comparative numerological studies whereas others, such as post 1970s American economy, don't seem to.