What leads to productivity gains?

After reading Paul Krugman's newsletter recently about technology and productivity gains, I had some thoughts about the topic.

He repeats his skepticism about cryptocurrency -- and I agree with his skepticism -- then muses on past predictions about the wonders of technology. One powerful example is the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even twenty years after the promised date, none of the fantastic futuristic features have actually happened, except for widespread video calls. He even includes a link to a list of 100 innovations predicted by futurist Herman Kahn in 1967, of which only one-fourth have been realized.

I have long considered the futuristic promises, and the changes that effect modern life, ever since sitting through GE's Wonderful World of Tomorrow at the 1965 World's Fair. My impressionable 11-year-old mind soaked it in, considering what sort of changes really change the way we live, noting that the major seismic shifts took place a hundred years ago, with the spread of electricity, the combustion engine, and air travel. Given Krugman's skepticism about the immanent marvels of technology, I think it boils down to speed of transport and speed of communication as primary factors in dramatic productivity increases as well as very seminal changes in the way we live. This factor would explain the burst of productivity after 1995, because of the spread of the internet -- dramatic increase in the speed of communication. After about ten years that increase gets factored in to production. Speed of communication does not in itself dramatically change our everyday life, but it does improve business productivity.

Actually what I think impressed my eleven-year-old self the most at that World's Fair show was the Theory of Mind -- the audio-animatronic characters on stage represented successive past generations of "typical American families", and at each stage of history (i.e. General Electric technology introductions) each declaimed that their current life was so good and so much better than before, any further improvement is hard to imagine! And yet we now consider those old families as so benighted. Thus is the benefit of literature, and historiography -- to consider life in the context of those who lived it at the time.

Any other ideas?

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