growth has slowed across advanced economies since the nineteen-seventies, with a brief interruption.
The slowdown is the single most important economic fact of the period and has no agreed explanation.
The measurement objection comes first and does not survive examination.
Digital services that are free do not appear in output, and their has been estimated repeatedly.
The adjustment closes a small part of the gap and leaves most of it standing.
A stronger account points to the distribution of technology rather than its invention.
The gap between the most productive firms in a sector and the rest has widened in every country studied.
continue to improve; the of their methods to everybody else has slowed.
That points at management practice, at market concentration and at the nature of modern capital.
A machine can be bought and copied; an organisational method cannot be purchased in the same sense.
Measured management quality predicts productivity strongly and varies enormously within the same industry and country.
Programmes that provided ordinary management advice to mid-sized firms produced large measured gains at low cost.
Few countries run them at scale, because industrial policy prefers a factory to a consultant.
Business investment is the other half and has been weak despite historically cheap finance.
Firms with cash have preferred to return it to , which is rational for a manager judged quarterly.
Nothing in that behaviour is irrational, and the outcome is an economy that invests less than it could.
Policy has responded mainly with tax for investment, which the evidence supports weakly.
The interventions with the best evidence are unglamorous: competition enforcement, management training and the slow work of .