Lots of people make that argument, but when asked "What are we under counting?" no one's been able to come up with a story that remains consistent when applied to multiple industries. Computers got much, much faster, but everything else stagnated.
It's fairly easy to measure how much money is produced per employee. That number grew 3% to 4% a year for most of the 20th Century, till 1973, when it collapsed. Since then it's average 1.5% a year (again, with a few good years in the 1990s, and with some up and down wobbles during the Great Recession).
The central fact is the big push towards automation in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s simply had a bigger impact than the kind of breakthroughs we've had in the last 40 years.
The automation of the telephone systems, and the removal of all the women who worked as operators, was huge in the 1940s and 1950s (and a fantastic boost to the computer industry). The later boom in multiplexing made capital investments more profitable, but did not increase the amount of money made per employee.
The introduction of the modern combine tractors on USA farms lead to a fantastic increase in agricultural productivity in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, and nothing since then has had a similar effect on agricultural productivity.
The introduction of digging robots transformed the coal industry in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Mountain top clearance was another huge change in how the work was done. Nothing since the 1960s has had anything like a similar impact. In fact, the opposite is true, increased environmental protections have, if anything, decreased productivity in that sector, or at least slowed the increase.
And on and on.
The transformations in the early to mid 20th Century were huge. The more recent transformations have been small. The Great Boom gave way to the Great Stagnation.
Check out:
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War
What's the starting time for that series? Early 1900s (say WW1), or back in the 1800s?
I've got an alternate explanation for the grandparent: the economy is undergoing a phase change from an industrial economy to an information economy, which will bring with it different assumptions about what an economy is. A future historian looking back on us from a century later will see steady growth in whatever metric they measure the economy in (likely volume of data produced) since about the 1970s. The fact that large sectors of the economy have shown negative productivity growth will drop out of the history books, because neither these non-software industries nor productivity as a concept will seem important to this historian.
I'm basing this on a thought experiment: what does the last major phase change in the economy (from largely subsistence-based agriculture to industrialization) look like now, and how do the metrics by which we judge it differ. The concept of productivity is basically nonsensical in a pre-industrial agricultural society - crop yields, of course, depend upon the wind, rain, and weather, and why would we expect them to increase in any non-random fashion? But real agricultural wages (likely a good proxy for productivity) skyrocketed between 1790 and 1810, and then declined by 20% [1, p 20] between then and 1850. To a farmer (that's most of society back then), their plight wouldn't look all that different from today's factory workers: the generation that came of age in 1850 did significantly worse than that of 1810. There was a bit of a bump when mechanized agriculture and meatpacking came out in the early 1900s, but this trend largely continued into the 1930s, at which point we basically stopped talking about small family farmers and got agribusiness instead.
But do we consider the 1800s a time of low productivity? No. We associate them now with the first and second industrial revolutions, which dramatically changed society and hugely increased productivity. "Industry" initially meant "the textile industry", because that was the first area that mass-production techniques were applied to. Over time these techniques spread until they took over the whole economy, at which point we could start measuring the economy by metrics like "productivity" that assume that innovation and capital can allow an individual worker to produce more than they could before. Former metrics like crop yields become an afterthought: as long as they're "enough", who cares?
If you start the clock at 1910 or even at 1870, you're looking only at the portion of history where the industrial economy is the economy. To get a better analogy to current conditions, you have to go back, before the Civil War, when the nascent industrial revolution is causing the collapse of plantations, slavery, seamstresses, tailors, whalers, and small farmers.
It's fairly easy to measure how much money is produced per employee. That number grew 3% to 4% a year for most of the 20th Century, till 1973, when it collapsed. Since then it's average 1.5% a year (again, with a few good years in the 1990s, and with some up and down wobbles during the Great Recession).
The central fact is the big push towards automation in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s simply had a bigger impact than the kind of breakthroughs we've had in the last 40 years.
The automation of the telephone systems, and the removal of all the women who worked as operators, was huge in the 1940s and 1950s (and a fantastic boost to the computer industry). The later boom in multiplexing made capital investments more profitable, but did not increase the amount of money made per employee.
The introduction of the modern combine tractors on USA farms lead to a fantastic increase in agricultural productivity in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, and nothing since then has had a similar effect on agricultural productivity.
The introduction of digging robots transformed the coal industry in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. Mountain top clearance was another huge change in how the work was done. Nothing since the 1960s has had anything like a similar impact. In fact, the opposite is true, increased environmental protections have, if anything, decreased productivity in that sector, or at least slowed the increase.
And on and on.
The transformations in the early to mid 20th Century were huge. The more recent transformations have been small. The Great Boom gave way to the Great Stagnation.
Check out:
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/d...