But has this changed massively over the past 30 or 40 years? Not really.
Frozen dinners have been around since longer than most of us have been alive. Working couples in the 1980's were figuring out what they'd do with grandma. Nursing homes have been around for a looong time. Mail-order delivery of boxes has been a thing since the end of the 1800's -- there were Sears warehouses long before Amazon warehouses.
That's all I'm saying. However, employees genuinely are much more productive than they were in the 1980's, thanks to e-mail and cell phones and the Internet and collaborative online document editing and so much more. You can get things done in an hour that used to take you 2 weeks of back-and-forth.
The productivity growth is real. It's not an illusion based on what GDP doesn't capture.
But has this changed massively over the past 30 or 40 years? Not really.
Frozen dinners have been around since longer than most of us have been alive. Working couples in the 1980's were figuring out what they'd do with grandma. Nursing homes have been around for a looong time. Mail-order delivery of boxes has been a thing since the end of the 1800's -- there were Sears warehouses long before Amazon warehouses.
That's all I'm saying. However, employees genuinely are much more productive than they were in the 1980's, thanks to e-mail and cell phones and the Internet and collaborative online document editing and so much more. You can get things done in an hour that used to take you 2 weeks of back-and-forth.
The productivity growth is real. It's not an illusion based on what GDP doesn't capture.