Productive Enough for Government Work

Statistics for the U.S. economy typically don’t pick up the productivity -- or lack thereof -- of government itself. The services government provides are not sold on markets, and so can’t be valued by standard methods. Nonetheless, government is a big part of any modern economy, with federal spending in the neighborhood of 20 percent of gross domestic product. So its productivity is a major issue.

Some ways of looking at government make it seem very productive indeed. In my capacity as a professor of economics, I’ve given talks at, visited or placed students at the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, among others. I have found each place to be a remarkable assemblage of talent, and the staff have strong work ethics, even when many of them could earn much more money in the private sector. It would seem that individual productivity within these institutions is high, or at the very least not abysmally low.