LaGarde asked me why we don’t see more evidence of economic growth from all the remarkable digital technology that is now available. My answer was (and is) that we factor out this growth by putting it in both the numerator and denominator. When a teenager in Africa spends $50 on a smartphone, it counts as $50 of economic activity, despite the fact that this purchase is equivalent to over a billion dollars of computation and communication technology circa 1965,
