Tech's Next Surprise: Jumpstarting Productivity

A paradox has stumped economists for years: Why has productivity stalled in a nation bursting with technological innovation? They’ve mostly ruled out the most obvious potential explanation – mismeasurement – while considering several others. It's likely, though, that we're just witnessing a temporary lull: Tech advances drove productivity growth before 2010, and they're likely to do so again in a not-so-distant future.

Last year, Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argued in his book "The Rise and Fall of American Growth” that the "third industrial revolution," commenced in the 1970s, largely ended by 2005. All the major changes to business processes through advances in information technology -- email and electronic catalogs, desktop publishing and check-in kiosks at airports, bar code scanners and quick credit card authorization -- had already happened by then.