alt Hacker News> Computers and the Internet ushered in huge productivity gains.
“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” — Robert Solow
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...
Connectivity/the Internet gave a bit of a boost during the 1990s, but the numbers pearked around 2004:
* https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-a...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
Replies
I mean productivity generally, not economic productivity as measured by market cap growth or GDP.
Nobody is operating businesses now without electronic cash registers, POS systems, accounting systems, etc. It's way more productive to use computers and the Internet than to try to accomplish the same stuff without them.
We wouldn’t expect productivity to keep growing from one innovation. Growth requires new innovations every year. So in the absence of innovations productivity would stop increasing.