This is endemic to the whole world now, which has supply chains stretched across the globe in a just in time inventory system. Some economist should figure out

This is endemic to the whole world now, which has supply chains stretched across the globe in a just in time inventory system. Some economist should figure out what percentage of our productivity gains weren't really productivity gains at all, but rather risk acceptance. E.g. if we are currently producing 1000 units per year, then a new plan in which we produce 1010 units 95% of the time, 1000 units 4.9% of the time, and then 1% of the time we'll produce only 400. And just as people do price comparisons of unreliable electricity generation to reliable generation without taking the reliability into account, the various executives that signed off on this assumed (correctly) that the public would see a gain and give them the appropriate bonuses. Wall Street did a similar thing during the Great Financial Crisis. This type of analysis has already been done by Dean Baker for productivity gains due to trade deficits[1] - e.g. instead of building an iPhone, we just design the iPhone, and then call up China and ask "make us 100 million of these", and because the designers can capture so much value of the finished phone, it appears like an explosion of labor productivity. But it's all contingent on having good terms of trade and strong IP enforcement. If these were to decline, we'd capture much less value and suddenly the productivity of those designers would plummet, even though they are still doing the same work per unit of time, because productivity is measured in terms of value creation. So it could well be that on an apples to apples comparison, total productivity growth in the US from 2000 to 2020 has been flat or negative, and we've merely hidden the losses elsewhere, for example in unexpected outages, labor force problems, or periods of rapidly rising prices (revaluations). [1] https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/productivity_2007_06.pdf https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/productivity_200...