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The productivity slump and what to do about it

The basic story of the last 40 years or so goes like this. Productivity settled into a groove of about 1.6 percent per year from the mid-1970s through the mid-90s. At that point, while some of it looked wasteful and bubbly (fiber optic to nowhere), many hypothesized that the investments in computers and the Internet ought to show up as faster productivity growth.
Productivity growth did significantly accelerate between the mid-90s and the mid-2000s, to almost 3 percent annually. Then it unexpectedly slowed, seriously downshifting to about less than 1 percent per year. The average annual growth rate since 2012 is a lamentable 0.6 percent.
When it comes to explaining these changes, economists tend to be uncharacteristically humble, as we should be (about this and much else, IMHO). But we are not totally at a loss, and we’ve usefully broken down productivity growth into three parts: capital per worker, labor quality, and what’s left over. We call the last bit “total factor productivity” (TFP) because “what’s left over” sounds much less smart.
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