The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 70)

by Robert J. Gordon

Improvements taking the form of a decreased disutility of work need not involve a reduction of hours, but rather may involve a decrease in the physical difficulty of work and in the discomfort involved in the nature of a work—for example, working in the intense heat of a steel mill.

disutility of a farmer who now plants his field in an air-conditioned and GPS-equipped tractor, contrasting it with the 1870 farmer guiding a plow behind a horse or mule.

Thus, by including home production, the value of leisure time, and the decreased unpleasantness of work, our concept of the standard of living goes beyond changes in the quantity and quality of goods and services purchased on the market.

Thus price indexes miss the welfare benefits of new products and the welfare-boosting effect of the price reductions early in the lives of new products.