The Economy Is Getting Hotter. Is a Productivity Boom Next?

The Economy Is Getting Hotter. Is a Productivity Boom Next?
“Once you eliminate the need for extensive training on a point of sale system, you
can focus on soft skills like customer service, and reduce the cost of turnover.”
The optimistic case for both productivity and overall economic growth goes like this: For the last several years, a lack of demand
and plenty of spare capacity of both workers and equipment made businesses complacent and unwilling to invest in new equipment, software or new ways of doing things that might allow more output per hour of labor.
The latest wrinkle is that the researchers now believe
that productivity growth depends not just on the supply side of the economy — what companies produce and what technologies they use to do it — but also significantly on the demand side.
“Unless displaced labor can find new highly productive and high-wage occupations, workers may end up in low-wage jobs
that create a drag on productivity growth,” the McKinsey researchers wrote.
It implies that as the economy returns to full employment, an outburst of faster
growth in productivity — and hence economic growth — is a real possibility.