Productivity Debates: Confusion is Not a New Argument

It speaks to the state of economic debate in the United States that we have prominent voices arguing both that we face a future in which productivity growth will be near zero (Robert Gordon)  and that productivity is about to soar through the roof so that most of us will not have any work to do (Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee). If we envisioned the same debate in climate science, a substantial group of climatologists would be warning of an impending ice age even as others raise conc...