If you want to get productivity up, shoot for full employment.
Hold the presses. The posts I have scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday have to get pushed back 24 hours to make room for this.
There is a PDF floating around, used to be at the Cowles Foundation at Yale but it's not there now...
Got it.
seven pages... Potential GNP: Its Measurement and Significance by Arthur Okun. First published in 1962, it is the original source of Okun's law.
I love these old studies, from back when econ hadn't yet gone bad.
Anyway, Okun has something on page six, something about productivity. Something too important to get lost in the bitstream.
Okun writes:
The record clearly shows that manhour productivity is depressed by low levels of utilization, and that periods of movement toward full employment yield considerably above-average productivity gains.
If you want to get productivity up, shoot for full employment.
1 comment:
We might turn this around and say that if productivity is down, we must be far from full employment. Instead of not knowing about productivity we can use what we know about productivity to say something about the level of unemployment.
Post a Comment