Productivity

We should want companies to shed workers they no longer need. Productivity gains flow to lower prices, higher wages, and long-term growth. Don’t slow innovation—accelerate it.

While the Hyundai Motor case now sits at the center of Korea’s AI jobs debate, the evidence suggests that the nation’s more immediate constraints are weak productivity growth and uneven labor-market adjustment—not large-scale technological displacement. How Korea responds will shape its competitiveness in a high-cost, aging manufacturing economy under intensifying global competition.

The culture of digital and AI opposition is a growing threat to American prosperity and power. Unless we return at least to neutrality, other nations unburdened by this self-doubt will surpass us.

After South Korea reduced its tax credit for automation in 2018 from 7 percent to 3 percent for large firms, South Korean industries, on average, reduced robot installations by 28 percent compared with their Japanese counterparts.

Culture matters. Just as England’s discomfort with industrialization weakened its economy, today’s U.S. elite skepticism risks becoming a collective headwind against digital progress.

Canada should prioritize boosting productivity through the adoption of advanced technologies across its firms and governments, rather than pursuing domestic ownership of existing infrastructure in the name of “digital sovereignty.”

Detractors of capitalism argue that it took over fifty years for the British Industrial Revolution’s benefits to reach average workers. That narrative is at best contested and, at worst, wrong.

If we’re lucky, AI will restore the productivity growth that has eluded us for 15 years—not through dystopian transformation, but through steady, incremental improvements across the economy.

From 1970 to the present, agricultural research conducted by a public research foundation in Brazil has increased Brazilian agricultural productivity by 110 percent.

Economists’ reliance on R&D and patent metrics distorts our understanding of productivity growth. Time to correct the conclusion: Here’s why these proxies fail to capture the forces that do drive it.