March 11, 2018

Raw Data: Worker Productivity Never Recovered From the Great Recession

Here is GDP per worker in the United States. It’s on a log scale so that it’s easier to see the inflection point in 2010:

We never really recovered from the Great Recession. Unemployment is down and wages are starting to rise, but worker productivity flattened suddenly in 2010 and never regained its old growth rate. As of 2017, it still hadn’t.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. 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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