FASTER, SLAVES! KEEP THOSE NUMBERS MOVING! Arnold Kling trumpets "The Good News About Productivity" and wonders aloud why we don't hear more about it before answering himself: because the media distorts the truth to elect Democrats ("the current Administration is unpopular with the media").

Maybe there's another reason. Some of us think of productivity as a completely positive, Jetsonian boon, whereby you just push a button and Rosie the Robot cleans your house, manages your database, monitors workflow etc., all to the greater glory of the national bottom line (a phenomenon also known as "The Economy as Corporate Identity Commercial").

But productivity is also something squeezed out of the hide of workers. From the International Labor Organization:

U.S. productivity grew in 2002, surpassing both Europe and Japan in annual output per worker for the first sustained period since World War II and further widening the productivity gap with the rest of the world.

But while productivity growth is up, job creation has not kept pace, the ILO finds in the third edition of Key Indicators of the Labor Market (KILM). The employment-to-population ratio in the U.S., which measures the proportion of people in the population who are working, declined 1.6 percent (from 64.3 to 62.7 percent) between 1999-2002. During the same period, the employment-to-population ratio increased slightly in the European Union (from 56.1 to 56.7 percent)...

Lawrence Jeff Johnson, chief of the employment trends team responsible for the comparative study released in September, told ILO Focus that "Americans are producing more with fewer workers in the labor market." At the same time, he explained, "labor market flexibility in the United States may be one of the factors allowing employers to adjust more quickly to changing economic conditions by shedding or adding jobs."

ILO also notes that "Americans worked more hours annually than many of their European counterparts, averaging 1,825 hours in 2002. In contrast, Germans worked 1,444 hours; the French 1,545 hours."

This may give you goose-pimples if you think of the U.S. economy as a machine, not as the product of workers who are now running up enormous personal debts to afford the homes, cars, and families that were, once upon a time, within easy reach for nearly anyone willing to work 40 hours a week.

Our Fed chief, by the way, is phlegmatic about this debt -- he recently "pointed out that U.S. households own more than $14 trillion in real estate assets — almost twice the amount they own in mutual funds and directly hold in stocks." Good news from someone's perspective, I guess -- creditors can credit the inflated values of these holdings (as debt, or as repossessed properties) on their balance sheets. In the long run, we are all dead, wot? (Or, as they play it Chicago-school, I got mine, don't worry about yours.)