The Productivity of Waiting in Line

Neil Irwin had an interesting Upshot piece highlighting a new paper by J.W. Mason arguing that slow productivity growth is in large part due to slow GDP growth. The basic argument is that if growth were faster, labor markets would be tighter, and companies would have more reason to invest in labor saving equipment.

While this argument strikes me as undoubtedly true, there is another aspect to productivity growth that is often missed. One thing that is even easier than replacing workers with e...