Month: August 2024

Labor productivity in Q2 was up 2.7% compared to last year, which is a nice reading. That's four consecutive quarters of productivity growth well over 2%.

But just to give you some perspective, here's labor productivity over the past three decades:

As you can see, after a brief (and artificial) spurt during the pandemic, we're now back at the pre-pandemic trendline of 1.3% average annual growth. That's half the 2.7% annual growth of 1996-2007.

That earlier period of high productivity growth is usually chalked up to businesses finally integrating PCs and LANs into their operations in a deep way, especially for logistics and other back-office tasks. In the past decade or so, growth has been slower because we still haven't really integrated the internet into business operations and we're not even close to integrating AI. Presumably that will come and eventually productivity will start to rise.

Which is good economic news but not necessarily such great news for workers, since it will probably be due to AI taking over jobs. Time will tell.

Construction spending fell in June for the second month in a row:

This is hardly cause for panic, but it's the first time construction spending has fallen two months in a row since the end of 2022. It's the first time commercial construction has fallen two months in a row since 2021.

It turns out all the rumors were true:

The United States, Russia, Germany and four other countries swapped at least two dozen people Thursday in the largest prisoner exchange since the height of the Cold War. Those released included American journalist Evan Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan, Russian dissidents and others from the United States, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Norway, Russia and Belarus.

It's funny. I went looking for news about this last night and there was nothing. I don't know if that's because no one had dug up anything new at the time or if the government had asked news organizations to keep quiet while they were working out final details.