Growth & Productivity

Watch

• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance | Angela Lee Duckworth | TED ↗TED
• How to become 37.78 times better at anything | Atomic Habits summary (by James Clear) ↗Escaping Ordinary (B.C Marx)
• How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio ↗Principles by Ray Dalio
• GRIT by Angela Duckworth | Animated CORE Message ↗Productivity Game

Read

• A Contribution to the Theory of Economic GrowthThe foundational paper that introduced the neoclassical growth model, explaining how capital accumulation and exogenous technological progress drive long-run prosperity.Robert M. Solow
• Growth Theory: An Exposition ↗A lucid, concise articulation of the seminal Solow-Swan growth model, essential for understanding the mechanics of economic expansion.Robert M. Solow
• Endogenous Technological ChangeA landmark work that fundamentally reshaped growth theory by demonstrating how innovation and technological progress are endogenous outcomes of economic incentives.Paul M. Romer
• Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty ↗A sweeping historical and institutional analysis arguing that inclusive political and economic institutions are the true engines of sustained growth and prosperity.Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
• The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better ↗A provocative essay positing that the era of easy technological gains is over, contributing to slower productivity growth in advanced economies.Tyler Cowen

Voices to follow

• Daron Acemoglu ↗His seminal work on institutions and their profound impact on economic development and long-term growth offers a crucial lens through which to understand productivity disparities across nations.Institute Professor of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Robert J. Gordon ↗A leading authority on the history of economic growth and productivity, he provocatively questions whether the digital revolution can match the transformative power of past industrial revolutions.Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences, Northwestern University
• Erik Brynjolfsson ↗His research at the intersection of economics and information technology illuminates how digital innovations are reshaping productivity, employment, and the future of economic growth.Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow, Stanford University
• Paul Krugman ↗A Nobel laureate, he offers accessible yet incisive commentary on macroeconomic trends, including the drivers and impediments to productivity and growth, often challenging conventional wisdom.Distinguished Professor of Economics, City University of New York; Opinion Columnist, The New York Times

Glossary

• CapitalThe man-made resources used to produce other goods and services, like machinery, tools, buildings, and factories. It's not just money, but the physical assets. For example, the sewing machines in a garment factory, the computers in an office, or the trucks used for delivery are all forms of capital.
• Economic GrowthWhen a country's economy gets bigger over time, meaning it produces more goods and services than before. This usually leads to more jobs and higher incomes. For example, if India's total production of goods and services (measured by GDP) increases by 5% in a year, that's economic growth.
• EfficiencyDoing things in the best possible way to avoid wasting time, money, or resources. It means getting the most out of what you have. For example, if a student learns to study smarter by focusing on key topics instead of rereading everything, they are studying more efficiently.
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP)The total value of all the goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific period, usually a year. It's the main way to measure a country's economic size and growth. For example, if India's GDP for 2023 was 3.7 trillion US dollars, that's the total value of everything produced in India that year.
• InputThe resources or ingredients that go into making something. These can include raw materials, labor (people's work), and machinery. For example, for a pizza shop, the inputs are flour, cheese, tomatoes, the oven, and the chef's time.
• Labor ProductivityA specific type of productivity that measures how much output each worker produces in a certain amount of time. It shows how effective workers are. For example, if a team of five construction workers builds one house in a month, and then learns new techniques to build two houses in a month, their labor productivity has improved.
• OutputThe final goods or services that are produced from using inputs. It's the result of the production process. For example, the output of a car factory is the cars it builds, and the output of a school is the educated students.
• ProductivityHow much stuff a person, company, or country can make or do with a certain amount of effort or resources. It's about getting more done with the same or less. For example, if a baker makes 10 cakes in an hour, and then buys a new oven that lets them make 20 cakes in an hour with the same effort, their productivity has doubled.
• ResourcesEverything available that can be used to produce goods and services. This includes natural resources (like land and water), human resources (people's skills and labor), and capital resources (tools and machines). For example, the resources needed to bake a cake include the ingredients (natural resources), the baker's skill (human resource), and the oven (capital resource).
• TechnologyThe tools, methods, and knowledge used to produce goods and services. New technology often helps us produce more efficiently or create new things. For example, the invention of the internet dramatically changed how people communicate and work, making many tasks more efficient.

Threads 8

Where this connects to other fields, and why it's worth knowing.

• Music & Sound Arts & Design

  A factory keeps making cars faster and cheaper every year. But a string quartet still needs four people and the same twenty minutes Beethoven did, no speeding it up. So as everything else gets cheaper to produce, human-only things like live music, haircuts, and teaching quietly cost us more and more. Economists call it Baumol's cost disease.

• Urbanisation and Cities Geography

  Here's something backwards: a big elephant burns less energy per kilo than a tiny mouse, so bigger animals run 'slower.' Cities do the opposite. Double a city's size and each person, on average, earns more, invents more, and does more. That's exactly why packing people into cities and growing the economy are really the same story.

• The Russia-Ukraine War Political Science

  You can conquer land and steal gold, but you can't seize a population's skills, trust, and institutions, those flee or freeze up the moment invaders arrive. In old farming economies, grabbing the farmland grabbed the wealth. In today's knowledge economy, the real value evaporates the instant you try to capture it, which is why conquest stopped paying.

• The Energy Transition Environment

  You'd think a more efficient engine burns less fuel. But when steam engines got better, people burned way more coal, because cheap power made them invent tons of new ways to use it. That trap is called the rebound effect: making energy cheaper to save it can make us gobble even more. It haunts every plan to fix climate change with efficiency alone.

• Sleep Health

  Stay awake all night and your brain works about as badly as if you were legally drunk, slow, foggy, and making dumb calls. Now multiply that across millions of tired workers making mistakes every day. All that lost sleep quietly drains a country's output more than most fancy economic policies could ever add back. Sleep is national wealth we throw away.

• Educational Technology Education

  There's an old economics puzzle: computers showed up everywhere except in the numbers proving they made us more productive. Ed-tech keeps hitting the same wall. Schools spend fortunes on shiny gadgets, yet measured learning barely budges. Turns out the tablet was never the real bottleneck holding learning back.

• AI in Business & Digital Transformation Business

  When factories first got electric motors, output barely improved for decades. They'd just bolted motors onto old steam-era layouts. Only after redesigning the whole floor did production leap. Most AI is stuck the same way: new tool, old setup.

• Renaissance and Enlightenment History

  For most of history, economies barely grew from one century to the next. Then the Enlightenment made "useful knowledge" something people shared and built on, each idea stacking on the last. That's roughly when growth broke its ancient ceiling and took off.