From the Streewise column in the Wall Street Journal, Is There a Productivity Miracle Lurking in the Economy?
Perhaps 2018 will be the year productivity finally begins to pick up. Technologies such as speech recognition, online chatbots and machine learning are being quickly adopted, capital spending is picking up and tight labor markets give companies an incentive to find better ways of working.
But productivity defies forecasters, and the lesson of the past is to be humble. This is a story of how little anyone really understands about what moves productivity, even though it’s the key to long-run prosperity—and to what happens to inflation and share and bond prices.
