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We’re In A Productivity Crisis. We Need To Get Serious About Solving It.
When politicians and pundits talk about the economy, they usually do so in terms of numbers. Unemployment is too high or GDP is too low. Inflation should be at this level or at that. You get the feeling that somebody somewhere is turning knobs and flicking levers in order to get the machine humming at just the right speed.
Yet the economy is really about our well being. It is, at its core, our capacity to produce goods and services that we want and need, such as the food that sustains us, the homes that shelter us and the medicines that cure us, not to mention all of the little niceties and guilty pleasures that we love to enjoy.
Our capacity to generate these things is determined by our productive capacity. Despite all the hype about digital technology creating a “new economy,” productivity growth for the past 50 years has been tremendously sluggish. If we are going to revive it and improve our lives we need to renew our commitment to scientific capital, human capital and free markets.
Restoring Scientific Capital
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, delivered a report, Science, The Endless Frontier, that argued that the US government needed to invest in “scientific capital” and through basic research and scientific education. It would set…
