The productivity crisis [feedly]
An excellent piece from Mike Roberts on " the productivity puzzle". He argues that if you exclude 'intangibles', mismeasurement, and "unproductive investment", you could add much of services, with respect to analyzing the decline, Marx's theory on the long run declining rate of profit as the proportion of fixed vs variable capital (labor) rises gets stronger. Roberts has spent years defending that theory. However, I am not sure the measurement, intangible or service aspects can be 'excluded' in order to understand what's going on. Take Amazon's 'Amazon Web Services' division. Independent of any reported profits on its services, or its impact on Amazon's stock price, it is as difficult to measure the real value-add of this massive web infrastructure as it would be to measure the value-added by the first bridge to cross the Mississippi River. The productivity crisis https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/05/30/the-producti...