> The article doesn't really examine productivity, it is examining wages. To wit: industrial automation has grown 6% YOY since 2003[1]. Manufacturing is up worldwide and robotic integration is exploding, not to mention software automation.
Which doesn't seem to have led to huge productivity gains on the order of 6% annually:
> Yet the timing does not seem to support Mr Gordon’s argument. The big leap in American economic growth took place between 1939 and 2000, when average output per person grew at 2.7% a year. Both before and after that period the rate was a lot lower: 1.5% from 1891 to 1939 and 0.9% from 2000 to 2013. And the dramatic dip in productivity growth after 2000 seems to have coincided with an apparent acceleration in technological advances as the web and smartphones spread everywhere and machine intelligence and robotics made rapid progress.
A 6% growth in the industrial automation market does not, by itself guarantee any set increase in productivity. All it guarantees is that companies are buying more robots.
While true, we can't really say that there's a causative relationship or even a particularly solid negative correlation between automation and productivity. In fact, it would be extremely counterintuitive (low prior) to find that there is.
Which doesn't seem to have led to huge productivity gains on the order of 6% annually:
> Yet the timing does not seem to support Mr Gordon’s argument. The big leap in American economic growth took place between 1939 and 2000, when average output per person grew at 2.7% a year. Both before and after that period the rate was a lot lower: 1.5% from 1891 to 1939 and 0.9% from 2000 to 2013. And the dramatic dip in productivity growth after 2000 seems to have coincided with an apparent acceleration in technological advances as the web and smartphones spread everywhere and machine intelligence and robotics made rapid progress.