Productivity growth, as seen in 1996

Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan suspected in nineteen ninety-six that information technology was delivering real productivity gains that the official statistics didn't yet capture. This belief helped him hold off on preemptive interest-rate increases. Nearly four years later, after the National Accounts were revised to treat software as capital investment, those numbers jumped — productivity growth for that same period rose from point eighty-nine percent to one point four percent. Per the St. Louis Federal Reserve Blog, we may be making the same measurement mistake with AI today. Current official data shows labor productivity growth of one point five-one percent, but future revisions might reveal the technology is contributing far more than we're counting now.

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