The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

by Erik Brynjolfsson

In order to consume YouTube, Facebook, or e-mail, we must ‘pay’ attention. In fact, Americans nearly doubled the amount of leisure time they spent on Internet between 2000 and 2011. This implies that they valued it more than the other ways they could spend their time. By considering the value of users’ time and comparing leisure time spent on the Internet to time spent in other ways, Erik and Joo Hee estimated that the Internet created about $2,600 of value per user each year. None of this showed up in the GDP statistics but if it had, GDP growth—and thus productivity growth—would have been about 0.3 percent higher each year. In other words, instead of the reported 1.2 percent productivity growth for 2012, it would have been 1.5 percent. In contrast