HavokFour
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Trump administration 2024-2028
- Thread starter dimsum
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HavokFour
Army.ca Veteran
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Further. That was kind of their entire argument for this whole farce, wasn't it?
Astounded judges force DOJ lawyer to concede that Sen. Kelly never said 'disobey lawful orders'
An appeals court hinted Pete Hegseth's mission to punish Sen. Mark Kelly for reminding troops they "can refuse illegal orders" is going absolutely nowhere.lawandcrime.com
Hegseth calls for Sen. Mark Kelly to be investigated by Pentagon for second time
But why?
Oh well that sounds bad. But wait! Hegseth should be investigating himself then if that's the case.
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You cannot get to a "third times the charm" without a second humiliating failure.Hegseth calls for Sen. Mark Kelly to be investigated by Pentagon for second time
But why?
Oh well that sounds bad. But wait! Hegseth should be investigating himself then if that's the case.
That's just math.
daftandbarmy
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Not all attributable to Trump, of course, but a few good lessons Canada could learn nevertheless ...
But those data kept coming. And now they are indisputable: over the past five years or so American productivity has been growing at the fastest rate in around two decades. Whether you look at non-farm businesses’ output per worker or per hour, it has risen by a lively 2% a year, from a moribund 1% for most of the 2010s (see chart 3). This has led the Federal Reserve to raise its median forecast for America’s long-run GDP growth from 1.8% to 2%. Jerome Powell, the outgoing chair, bore witness at a recent press conference. “I never thought I’d see this many years of really high productivity,” he marvelled in response to a question from The Economist.
It is too early to credit artificial intelligence for the resurrection. Productivity began picking up in the early 2020s, whereas large language models have come into real commercial use only in the past year or so. If previous technological revolutions are anything to go by, the AI age will take at least a few years to show up in productivity statistics. The main macroeconomically discernible impact of the AI boom so far has been on business investment, particularly in data centres.
To divine the real causes of the phenomenon, The Economist started by poring over official data on productivity growth by sector since 2000 from America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics. Between 2019 and 2024 the “information” industry—which covers areas from software and telecoms to publishing and film-making—came top with an annual rate of around 6%. That was no higher than the annual average in 2000-19. Nor is America’s recent uptick the consequence of this particularly efficient industry accounting for a bigger slice of the economy: in the past six years the sector’s share of total American output has hovered between 5.3% and 5.5%.
Instead, some of the biggest jumps in productivity growth have come in professional services and management (see chart 4). Together, these make up around 10% of the American economy, up a little from 2019. They are the sorts of businesses that do not produce new technology, but are voracious users of it. In the past few years America’s suits have at last taken full advantage of the signature innovations of the 2010s: smartphones, cloud computing, videoconferencing and the like.
Productivity growth also sped up in oil and gas. The shale-fracking revolution of the 2010s turned America from a net energy importer to an exporter. In 2023 it sold half as much energy abroad, net of imports, as Saudi Arabia. Since then, construction of new liquefaction plants for natural gas has allowed America to send the fuel to Europe and Asia, where it fetches higher prices than at home.
The indirect effects of America’s energy boom may be yet more consequential. Electricity is an input into just about everything and Americans pay half as much for it, on average, as Europeans and a third less than the Japanese. When it is inexpensive and abundant, workers and machinery can keep producing as much as possible without worrying too much about energy use. This helps explain why some energy-intensive businesses like mining and chemicals have not collapsed as they have in Europe.
America is experiencing a productivity miracle
AI hasn’t—yet—got much to do with it
As with many a miracle, onlookers disbelieved their eyes at first. For a decade after the global financial crisis of 2007-09 rich-world productivity growth was, by historical standards, dead. Since economic prosperity ultimately depends on the ability to produce more with the same labour, this consigned even prosperous America to eternal stagnation (and don’t ask about Europe). The Congressional Budget Office, a fiscal watchdog which consistently overestimated productivity growth in the 2010s, has been consistently glum this decade (see charts 1 and 2). Partial data hinting otherwise were dismissed as false prophets.But those data kept coming. And now they are indisputable: over the past five years or so American productivity has been growing at the fastest rate in around two decades. Whether you look at non-farm businesses’ output per worker or per hour, it has risen by a lively 2% a year, from a moribund 1% for most of the 2010s (see chart 3). This has led the Federal Reserve to raise its median forecast for America’s long-run GDP growth from 1.8% to 2%. Jerome Powell, the outgoing chair, bore witness at a recent press conference. “I never thought I’d see this many years of really high productivity,” he marvelled in response to a question from The Economist.
It is too early to credit artificial intelligence for the resurrection. Productivity began picking up in the early 2020s, whereas large language models have come into real commercial use only in the past year or so. If previous technological revolutions are anything to go by, the AI age will take at least a few years to show up in productivity statistics. The main macroeconomically discernible impact of the AI boom so far has been on business investment, particularly in data centres.
To divine the real causes of the phenomenon, The Economist started by poring over official data on productivity growth by sector since 2000 from America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics. Between 2019 and 2024 the “information” industry—which covers areas from software and telecoms to publishing and film-making—came top with an annual rate of around 6%. That was no higher than the annual average in 2000-19. Nor is America’s recent uptick the consequence of this particularly efficient industry accounting for a bigger slice of the economy: in the past six years the sector’s share of total American output has hovered between 5.3% and 5.5%.
Instead, some of the biggest jumps in productivity growth have come in professional services and management (see chart 4). Together, these make up around 10% of the American economy, up a little from 2019. They are the sorts of businesses that do not produce new technology, but are voracious users of it. In the past few years America’s suits have at last taken full advantage of the signature innovations of the 2010s: smartphones, cloud computing, videoconferencing and the like.
Productivity growth also sped up in oil and gas. The shale-fracking revolution of the 2010s turned America from a net energy importer to an exporter. In 2023 it sold half as much energy abroad, net of imports, as Saudi Arabia. Since then, construction of new liquefaction plants for natural gas has allowed America to send the fuel to Europe and Asia, where it fetches higher prices than at home.
The indirect effects of America’s energy boom may be yet more consequential. Electricity is an input into just about everything and Americans pay half as much for it, on average, as Europeans and a third less than the Japanese. When it is inexpensive and abundant, workers and machinery can keep producing as much as possible without worrying too much about energy use. This helps explain why some energy-intensive businesses like mining and chemicals have not collapsed as they have in Europe.