Airline tickets 20 years ago cost the airlines about $20 to produce. But this sort of technology is certain to displace workers, at least in the short run, unless a fall in prices increases real incomes enough ....
The jobs in the US are being produced in low wage service occupations, which do not allow much technical change. On Sat, Sep 22, 2007 at 01:51:07PM +0100, Daniel Davies wrote: > I think the remaining critique - Doug is right that the pro-boost side has > basically won this argument - is that the productivity gains seemed to be > very heavily weighted to retail and to financial services, which are the two > sectors where it's most difficult to separate productivity and value-added. > But as far as financial services is concerned, productivity has genuinely > increased massively - just look at the growth of electronic exchanges > compared to voice or open outcry. Massive computerisation of insurance > underwriting too in the last ten years. > > best > dd > > -----Original Message----- > From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of raghu > Sent: 21 September 2007 23:31 > To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU > Subject: Re: Queery about Greenspan and productivity > > > > > If I understand correctly much of the late 90's productivity gains > came from the computer industry itself. i.e. businesses buying all > those computers were not getting much for it, but the computer > industry being dominated so heavily by fixed costs, any additional > sales of say a Pentium chip or Oracle software would be almost pure > profit thereby generating massive apparent productivity gains. > http://www.nber.org/~confer/2001/prods01/stiroh.pdf > > What is surprising is productivity did not actually drop merely > decelerated after the crash. Maybe it has something to do with mass > layoffs, or maybe with some real gains from technology like targeted > advertising on Google. But I suspect part of the explanation is in the > accounting of outsourcing activities. > -raghu. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com
