The story of economic growth in the modern Western world is in many ways a story about the triumph of productivity thinking. But then the knowledge sector emerged as a major force in the mid-twentieth century, and this profitable dependence on crisp, quantitative, formal notions of productivity all but vanished. There was, as it turns out, a good reason for this abandonment: the old notions of productivity that worked so well in farming and manufacturing didn’t seem to apply to this new style of cognitive work.
