But Mr Gordon has a point when he says that output plainly grew above trend in the late 1990s (witness falling unemployment and a rising current-account deficit), so productivity must have grown faster than trend as well.
Meanwhile, U.S. unit labor costs in manufacturing, where the head-to-head competition for jobs lies, have been on a steady downward trend, because productivity growth has been strong and wage increases moderate.
On the basis of the past few years, he thinks the trend rate of productivity growth - and thus the economy's potential growth rate - is lower than we thought before the crisis.
Short of that is a more plausible wish: that today's far-reaching changes in the way business is done will soon lift the trend of growth in productivity across the economy as a whole.
Certainly productivity increases have softened the ill effects of this trend, but with some 77 million Baby Boomers at or approaching retirement age, the ratio will drop even more, to an estimated 2.1 workers for each retiree.
Simply put, this trend has big potential to revolutionize information-worker productivity.
FORBES: Mobile Devices at Work: You Can't Take It With You...Or Can You?
Obscured behind a persistent set of misconceptions is a much more nuanced view of this critical workplace technology trend and the opportunities it offers to improve business productivity.
To the extent that many of Europe's new jobs are for lower-paid (and hence lower-skilled) workers, this trend may, at least in the short term, dampen labour productivity growth.
This demographic trend will have a profound impact on medical costs, businesses, worker efficiency and productivity.
Low productivity remains its Achilles heel, with no clear signs of any recent pick-up in its trend growth.
Likewise, low growth that is below trend in an economy with a high trend rate of growth (perhaps because of a fast-growing labour force or high productivity growth) will feel like a recession and will cause unemployment to rise.
To the extent that America's productivity upswing is structural (and sustained), one tool of monetary policy analysis the projection of a trend rate of growth is increasingly tricky.
应用推荐