OPPORTUNITIES BEFORE EFFICIENCIES

In the coming era, doing the exactly right…

…next thing is far more fruitful than doing the same thing better.

But how can one easily measure this vital sense of exploration and discovery? It will be invisible if you measure productivity. But in the absence of alternative measures, productivity has become a bugaboo. It continues to obsess economists because there is little else they know how to measure consistently.

As bureaucrats continue to measure productivity, they find no substantial increase in recent decades. This despite $700 billion invested into computer technology worldwide each year. Millions of people and companies worldwide purchase computer technology because it increases the quality of their work, but in the aggregate there is no record of their benefits in the traditional measurements. This unexpected finding is called the productivity paradox. As Nobel laureate Robert Solow once quipped, “Computers can be found everywhere except in economic statistics.”