The Myth of American Productivity

[Azrael]

Manufacturing productivity gains overstated

due to import price bias

interesting article discusses problems with productivity data, ideas on how to determine competitiveness of various industries

[Aferim]

Very interesting. Worst of all, it could be true.

[YMix]

Thanks for posting this.

[Azrael]

more in the same vein

Cause of the Financial Breakdown: It's Not a Crisis of Confidence

By Michael Mandel

This tri-flow worked as long as everyone believed that American consumers could finance their debt. But here's the problem: At the same time Americans were borrowing, their real wages were falling -- and not just for the least educated. By BusinessWeek's calculations, real weekly earnings for college grads without an advanced degree have dropped every year since 2002.

You can't pay back rising debt with falling wages; something had to give.

The first thing that broke were subprime mortgages, given to less creditworthy borrowers. But once investors started to look, they realized that the entire global edifice was built on an impossibility. The tri-flow that had built global prosperity could not be sustained.

. . .

Policymakers should stop talking about investor confidence as if it exists in a vacuum. Instead, they should focus on the real goal of stimulating the creation of innovative new goods and services that the U.S. can produce and sell on global markets. That would reduce the amount of borrowing the country has to do, and help create a sustainable global economy.