Читать книгу Stakeholder Capitalism - Klaus Schwab - Страница 23

Compounding many of the structural issues outlined in this chapter is the fact that productivity gains have been low in recent years. Indeed, it was because of rising productivity, more so perhaps than demographic growth, that the middle class in the West saw their incomes rise quickly during the first decades after the war.

Productivity goes up most often because of innovations in the way things are made or done. Well-known examples of productivity gains are the assembly line Ford introduced in the early 1900s, the introduction of digital computers instead of typewriters in the 1970s and 1980s, or the optimizing of a taxi route thanks to apps such as Waze today. All these innovations enable a given worker to produce the same output, or do the same job, in considerably less time. That in turn allowed companies to increase wages.

In the past, the world knew periods of high productivity gains, which translated into high wage growth. During America's golden age of capitalism in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the annual productivity growth was almost 3 percent per year.³⁴ But productivity gains afterward fell to lower levels, and, problematically, even when productivity did rebound, less of it was translated into take-home pay for American workers. Instead, it remained with the businessowners and executives, a phenomenon known as the “decoupling” of wages from productivity.³⁵

Since the 2007–2009 financial crisis, US productivity growth has fallen to the meager level of 1.3 percent per year. That is a problem, because it means it is not possible to grow the pie for everyone anymore. The distribution of today's economic gains is a quasi-zero-sum game. Other countries, such as Germany, Denmark, and Japan, have kept up productivity gains better and translated them also in higher wages. But the trendline is unmistakable: productivity gains in the West are experiencing a marked decline.

Taken together, the indicators presented in this chapter—growth, interest rates, debt, and productivity—point to a systemic design error in the Western economic development model. Much of its prosperity model was based on perpetual economic growth and productivity gains. Now, that growth is grinding to a halt, and problems that had been festering under the surface are becoming more acute by the day.

Kuznets’ curse is coming back to haunt us. GDP was never a perfect measure for well-being. And now that it is becoming an ever-greater challenge to grow it, we will have to deal with a whole basket of other problems we created while pursuing that higher growth.