In his new book “The Complacent Class,” my Bloomberg View colleague Tyler Cowen mentions that more Americans may be slacking off at work. He offers this as one more measure of the comfortable malaise into which American culture has settled. But it also occurs to me that if leisure is replacing effort at work, it means that the country may be getting more productive more quickly than economists realize.
Productivity is a measure of how much output the economy can get for a given amount of inputs. Total factor productivity measures output as a function of labor and capital both, while labor productivity takes only workers’ time and effort into account. Both have been slowing in developed countries in the past decade. Here’s a picture of U.S. labor productivity:
