Why Is Productivity Growth So Sluggish?

To start off the week, here is one of the enduring puzzles of the past decade: why has labor productivity grown so slowly during the recovery from the Great Recession?

Is it because the minimum wage hasn’t gone up much, giving employers little incentive to replace people with machines? Is it because the best minds of our generation are creating dating apps instead of useful labor-saving devices? Is it because the early stages of AI are so hit-and-miss that it does as much harm as good?

Leave your guess in comments. The winner gets an all-expenses-paid tenured professorship at Harvard.

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HERE’S WHERE YOU COME IN

We’ll say it loud and clear: No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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