Maybe it is because I am German, but I am fascinated by the decline in productivity growth in Europe and North America. In the past, I have written about the decline in research productivity and the reduced capital investment in workers. Now, a new study has tried to assess the relative importance of these and other factors in a range of countries.
Regarding productivity I often think about the missed opportunities, considering all the tech driven productivity tools that have been made available over the years. Excel, Word, email, video conferencing, the list goes on. A lot of this goes to waste because we have added unnecessary and wasteful activities and lots of extra red tape. Imagine doing what we did 50 years ago with the help of today’s tools …. What a productivity explosion …
I know plenty of 50/60 yo gentlemen in sales and marketing who still hang around in Excel sheets because they can't be bothered teaching themselves a CRM.
I also know that the dozens and dozens of CRM's out there are basically copies. Just like the language of the websites of the funky startups selling them (enhanced by images of maniacally smiling young people).
I've also worked with inhouse-created sales & marcom CRMs. Made by the IT department. Awful enough to use in CIA advanced interrogating facilities...
Working at E&Y for a short time a few years ago the secretaries there crumbled thinking of all the work they had to do to just get me access to their systems, get me an emailaddress etc. It took days. And they weren't 'in the cloud', everthing on premise...
Email can be a terror with its gigantic threads. Plenty of people occupying white collar BS jobs in gov or the commercial sphere suggest activity by emailing like crazy.
'Fewer benefits from international trade accounted for about a quarter of the productivity decline in the UK and close to a third in Germany'
Andy Haldane had a lot to say about UK productivity in this presentation: 'LSE Events | Andrew G Haldane | The Productivity Puzzle' (Youtube). Transcript: https://www.bis.org/review/r170322b.pdf
One of his points - 10% of zombies will go bust if interest rates rise to 4% - hasn't played out that way. Covid and gov's responses have had a lot of impact. UK bankruptcies are rising since 2022 but they're nowhere near the pre covid era: https://tinyurl.com/6y9xv7np
4 key Haldane points:
- Lack of exposure to foreign competitors (you being over there or them being active in your country) sees productivity decline;
- Organizational size impacts innovation and thus productivity;
- In the UK catchng up by lagging companies has slowed since the 80s;
- The rate with which productive innovations spread from the core to the perifery has declined.
(I support my memory by taking notes so i 'll post all of his key ideas/finds at the bottom of my, traditionally very short, comment)
'Finally, there is about 10% to 20% of the productivity decline that is likely due to measurement errors and the inherent difficulties in determining what constitutes productivity growth'
The productivity effect of the introduction at scale of IT in the 1990s has been measered in the US - but only a bit. Nothing in Europe. Now are new technologes always adopted slower in Europe - lower risk tolerance - but i guess for both areas difficultiy in measuring also plays a role. But, as IT was introduced the US has seen immigration at levels almost equalling 19th centruy highs, and Europe opened up to eastern Europe and then to the rest of the world. It added between 35 and 40 non EU immigrants since the 90s.
So productivity growth from wage suppression must be factored in. But for particular industries like automotive, manufacturing and pharma (per a 2019 McKinsey study https://tinyurl.com/45t9fyp7. In total about 11% of US labor's loss of share of income can be attributed to globalization. But many studies looking at that subject end with 'we should study some more'...)
'the misallocation of capital results from the persistent decline in bankruptcies and creative destruction'
QE + Low Interest rates = more zombies and at the same time more cheap capital for funky startups that add nothing but hyperbole.
Here's Scott Brinker's annual marketing-tech landscape evolution in two years & two graphs (if you have experience with startup websites i.e. with figuriing out what the hell they actually do and sell...Envision buyer a buyer here):
'It now contains 11,038 solutions — an 11% increase from the 9,932 we charted last year.'
And these are the SaaS startups that survived...And it's just the tech for marketing & sales...
Btw: I wanted to see the aging dfference between the UK and De, since i recollected that DE numbers must be worse. But put 'European' in a Google search for recent aging numbers - 'European countries by aging' - and the UK isn't pulled up. Turkey is, so are Moldova, Norway...I had to scroll down to a Wiki for a guick glance at a chart. Fertility rate UK = 1.68, DE = 1.58.
Andy Haldane's points:
Digest of some of his points:
'The UK is 28th for road-quality, spends not a lot on r&d and financial literacy is low compared to other countries.
Organisation size impacts innovation. The UK has many small companies who often can’t improve. But there is an upper tail of SMBs who are very productive. And typically, small organisations grow productivity faster than enterprises.
Since the 80’s the pace of catching up by laggards has slowed.
‘Frontier’ orgs i.e. the most productive/innovative have maintained productivity growth, so secular innovation is continuing there. But secular stagnation exists for a third to a half of orgs where productivity has stood still over the past 2 decades.
The decline in productivity diffusion i.e. the rate and impact with which it spreads from frontier orgs to core- and lagging orgs is the reason for the difference in productivity distribution along the measured orgs.
Does the quality of management contribute to the UK’s lag in prod? Yes, has LSE research shown. A 1 standard deviation in management competence raises UK productivity by ten%.
Organisations that export perform better because they’re exposed to efficient foreign competitors. On average they are a third more productive. The more they export the more productive they are. Raise export by 10% and that will boost productivity by 3%.
Organisations that are foreign owned perform better, and are fully twice as productive as non-foreign owned. They are more likely to be integrated in international supply chains and are being exposed to strong competitors.
Organisation size impacts innovation. The UK has many small companies who often can’t improve. But there is an upper tail of SMBs who are very productive.
A 4% rise in interest rates would cause 10% of highly leveraged orgs to go bust. Most are zombies but gazelles are also there. This scenario would lead to a prod increase of 1,2%.
Employment would lower by 5%. This scenario doesn't have Aldane's preference.
To improve UK productivity one should not want to create the next Tesla but rather raise productivity for the bulk of orgs by a bit: focusing on small incrementals for 75% of all orgs would boost productivity by 13% and elevate the UK to FR and DE levels.
Immigration is also a factor (low skill immigration to the UK decreases investments in technology). And since 2008 workers have moved less between jobs so ideas and innovation don't spread as rapidly as in the past.
R&D: Publicly owned orgs tend to invest less than privately owned, usually 2/2,5 times less than private orgs. Publics pay dividends and execs and that is at the expense of r&d. Haldane would like to see more corp governance so that orgs are measured on their long term investments.'
The tremendous amount of Western resources going into renewables is both raising the cost of energy and siphoning away resources from productive uses to the unproductive. If one is convinced of the climate crisis thesis, a more rational approach would be to design a modular nuclear plant that can dispatched across a range of its output. It would be mass produced off-site, with all the regulatory/safety variables accounted for.
Well, I am a HUGE fan of nuclear energy and in particular small modular reactors and molten salt reactors. We need to build more of them and as fast as possible to have a reliable energy source.
But where I disagree with you is renewables. Renewables are already the cheapest form of energy anywhere in the world (In the US, onshore wind in the Texas Plains is the cheapest energy source in the country and so cheap that Exxon uses it to power their shale gas pumps).
Also, outside the US, renewables together with nuclear are the best way to energy independence. Don't forget that in Europe, we don't have our own oil & gas and are dependent n countries like Russia and now Qatar. So if we want to be independent from these suppliers, we need renewables.
First of all thanks for your newsletter. Top!
Regarding productivity I often think about the missed opportunities, considering all the tech driven productivity tools that have been made available over the years. Excel, Word, email, video conferencing, the list goes on. A lot of this goes to waste because we have added unnecessary and wasteful activities and lots of extra red tape. Imagine doing what we did 50 years ago with the help of today’s tools …. What a productivity explosion …
Agree, and I will have a post on this in a couple of weeks' time.
I know plenty of 50/60 yo gentlemen in sales and marketing who still hang around in Excel sheets because they can't be bothered teaching themselves a CRM.
I also know that the dozens and dozens of CRM's out there are basically copies. Just like the language of the websites of the funky startups selling them (enhanced by images of maniacally smiling young people).
I've also worked with inhouse-created sales & marcom CRMs. Made by the IT department. Awful enough to use in CIA advanced interrogating facilities...
Working at E&Y for a short time a few years ago the secretaries there crumbled thinking of all the work they had to do to just get me access to their systems, get me an emailaddress etc. It took days. And they weren't 'in the cloud', everthing on premise...
Email can be a terror with its gigantic threads. Plenty of people occupying white collar BS jobs in gov or the commercial sphere suggest activity by emailing like crazy.
In between meetings of course.
'Fewer benefits from international trade accounted for about a quarter of the productivity decline in the UK and close to a third in Germany'
Andy Haldane had a lot to say about UK productivity in this presentation: 'LSE Events | Andrew G Haldane | The Productivity Puzzle' (Youtube). Transcript: https://www.bis.org/review/r170322b.pdf
One of his points - 10% of zombies will go bust if interest rates rise to 4% - hasn't played out that way. Covid and gov's responses have had a lot of impact. UK bankruptcies are rising since 2022 but they're nowhere near the pre covid era: https://tinyurl.com/6y9xv7np
4 key Haldane points:
- Lack of exposure to foreign competitors (you being over there or them being active in your country) sees productivity decline;
- Organizational size impacts innovation and thus productivity;
- In the UK catchng up by lagging companies has slowed since the 80s;
- The rate with which productive innovations spread from the core to the perifery has declined.
(I support my memory by taking notes so i 'll post all of his key ideas/finds at the bottom of my, traditionally very short, comment)
'Finally, there is about 10% to 20% of the productivity decline that is likely due to measurement errors and the inherent difficulties in determining what constitutes productivity growth'
The productivity effect of the introduction at scale of IT in the 1990s has been measered in the US - but only a bit. Nothing in Europe. Now are new technologes always adopted slower in Europe - lower risk tolerance - but i guess for both areas difficultiy in measuring also plays a role. But, as IT was introduced the US has seen immigration at levels almost equalling 19th centruy highs, and Europe opened up to eastern Europe and then to the rest of the world. It added between 35 and 40 non EU immigrants since the 90s.
So productivity growth from wage suppression must be factored in. But for particular industries like automotive, manufacturing and pharma (per a 2019 McKinsey study https://tinyurl.com/45t9fyp7. In total about 11% of US labor's loss of share of income can be attributed to globalization. But many studies looking at that subject end with 'we should study some more'...)
'the misallocation of capital results from the persistent decline in bankruptcies and creative destruction'
QE + Low Interest rates = more zombies and at the same time more cheap capital for funky startups that add nothing but hyperbole.
Here's Scott Brinker's annual marketing-tech landscape evolution in two years & two graphs (if you have experience with startup websites i.e. with figuriing out what the hell they actually do and sell...Envision buyer a buyer here):
2014 https://chiefmartec.com/2014/01/marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-2014/
'It represents a whopping 947 different companies that provide software for marketers, organized into 43 categories across 6 major classes'
2023 https://chiefmartec.com/2023/05/2023-marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-11038-solutions-searchable-on-martechmap-com/
'It now contains 11,038 solutions — an 11% increase from the 9,932 we charted last year.'
And these are the SaaS startups that survived...And it's just the tech for marketing & sales...
Btw: I wanted to see the aging dfference between the UK and De, since i recollected that DE numbers must be worse. But put 'European' in a Google search for recent aging numbers - 'European countries by aging' - and the UK isn't pulled up. Turkey is, so are Moldova, Norway...I had to scroll down to a Wiki for a guick glance at a chart. Fertility rate UK = 1.68, DE = 1.58.
Andy Haldane's points:
Digest of some of his points:
'The UK is 28th for road-quality, spends not a lot on r&d and financial literacy is low compared to other countries.
Organisation size impacts innovation. The UK has many small companies who often can’t improve. But there is an upper tail of SMBs who are very productive. And typically, small organisations grow productivity faster than enterprises.
Since the 80’s the pace of catching up by laggards has slowed.
‘Frontier’ orgs i.e. the most productive/innovative have maintained productivity growth, so secular innovation is continuing there. But secular stagnation exists for a third to a half of orgs where productivity has stood still over the past 2 decades.
The decline in productivity diffusion i.e. the rate and impact with which it spreads from frontier orgs to core- and lagging orgs is the reason for the difference in productivity distribution along the measured orgs.
Does the quality of management contribute to the UK’s lag in prod? Yes, has LSE research shown. A 1 standard deviation in management competence raises UK productivity by ten%.
Organisations that export perform better because they’re exposed to efficient foreign competitors. On average they are a third more productive. The more they export the more productive they are. Raise export by 10% and that will boost productivity by 3%.
Organisations that are foreign owned perform better, and are fully twice as productive as non-foreign owned. They are more likely to be integrated in international supply chains and are being exposed to strong competitors.
Organisation size impacts innovation. The UK has many small companies who often can’t improve. But there is an upper tail of SMBs who are very productive.
A 4% rise in interest rates would cause 10% of highly leveraged orgs to go bust. Most are zombies but gazelles are also there. This scenario would lead to a prod increase of 1,2%.
Employment would lower by 5%. This scenario doesn't have Aldane's preference.
To improve UK productivity one should not want to create the next Tesla but rather raise productivity for the bulk of orgs by a bit: focusing on small incrementals for 75% of all orgs would boost productivity by 13% and elevate the UK to FR and DE levels.
Immigration is also a factor (low skill immigration to the UK decreases investments in technology). And since 2008 workers have moved less between jobs so ideas and innovation don't spread as rapidly as in the past.
R&D: Publicly owned orgs tend to invest less than privately owned, usually 2/2,5 times less than private orgs. Publics pay dividends and execs and that is at the expense of r&d. Haldane would like to see more corp governance so that orgs are measured on their long term investments.'
The tremendous amount of Western resources going into renewables is both raising the cost of energy and siphoning away resources from productive uses to the unproductive. If one is convinced of the climate crisis thesis, a more rational approach would be to design a modular nuclear plant that can dispatched across a range of its output. It would be mass produced off-site, with all the regulatory/safety variables accounted for.
Well, I am a HUGE fan of nuclear energy and in particular small modular reactors and molten salt reactors. We need to build more of them and as fast as possible to have a reliable energy source.
But where I disagree with you is renewables. Renewables are already the cheapest form of energy anywhere in the world (In the US, onshore wind in the Texas Plains is the cheapest energy source in the country and so cheap that Exxon uses it to power their shale gas pumps).
Also, outside the US, renewables together with nuclear are the best way to energy independence. Don't forget that in Europe, we don't have our own oil & gas and are dependent n countries like Russia and now Qatar. So if we want to be independent from these suppliers, we need renewables.