As soon as you realize that "productivity" is measured in dollars, this seems like an unsurprising result. Supposed gains in productivity over the last $many ye

As soon as you realize that "productivity" is measured in dollars, this seems like an unsurprising result. Supposed gains in productivity over the last $many years have mostly been driven by relatively few very high "earners" (using that term more loosely than it has ever been used before). It's like the old joke about Bill Gates walking into a room and the average person in the room suddenly being a multi-millionaire ... even though nothing has actually changed for them. When a metric is inflated by a very small number of contributing data points, the loss of even a few of those data points will inevitably bring the number back down. As you all know, we've lost more than a few lately. The story is only interesting if the result remains significant after accounting for that.