Oren:
Last Thursday, your organization, American Compass, was released as part of a series to advocate for tighter restrictions on immigration.Labor supply guideHe said. In this guide, you’ll find 16 graphs that, individually and collectively, are clearly intended to tell the story of America’s economic woes.
Before you agree to share your despair, however, I have some questions about your data.
In Graph #8 (“Economy-wide, no evidence that employers are investing to boost productivity”), they report that annual productivity growth over the past decade has been a negative 1.8 percent. In Graph #10 (“The US Lags Far Behind Other Nations in Automation”), they provide data showing that US factories lag far behind factories in counties such as Korea, Japan, China and Sweden in installing productivity-enhancing robots. Graph #11 (“Manufacturing Productivity Growth Has Slowed, and Output Growth Has Fallen”) and #12 report more on the dire state of US productivity: Graph #12 is titled “Manufacturing Productivity Has Really Been Up Over the Past Decade.” It was not accepted.
But we’re treated to data from graphs #13 (“Productivity, profits, and GDP have risen sharply since the 1960s, while wages have lagged”) and #14 (“Looks Wrong: 50 Years of Economic Growth”). Over the past decades, the productivity has shown amazingly has risen; Your goal with these latter graphs is to indict the US economy for its failure to share productivity growth with workers.
So which one is it? Has American economic productivity stagnated (as you say) or not (as you say) over the past few decades?
I would examine your data to answer this question myself, but the source information you provide on each graph is completely inadequate to tell readers where you got your data from and how to adjust them for inflation. References to the sources of these data only give the names of the bureaus (eg, “US Census Bureau”), but do not list any of the pages on these websites. Since the number of pages of data on each of these sites is obscene, readers who want to verify the accuracy of your data will have to spend hours searching through these practically infinite number of pages.
May I ask you to publish more detailed information on each of the graph data sources?
If you got any doubts about the accuracy of your data in my question, you got it right. As I found out a few days ago about what you call Your indifference to your data on the “wage stagnation problem that has plagued the US economy for 50 years now” can’t help but cast doubt on their accuracy and interpretation. Contrary to your question, these workers’ real earnings at work have grown dramatically over a quarter of a century.
Perhaps there is a plausible way to intertwine your claim that productivity is flat with your claim that productivity is rising. If so, I urge you to share it.
best regard
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
And
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
