{"id":344,"date":"2010-02-04T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T15:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intuitiveinvestor.com\/web\/?p=344"},"modified":"2018-08-21T09:19:09","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T13:19:09","slug":"productivity-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/2010\/02\/04\/productivity-results\/","title":{"rendered":"Productivity results"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Good morning! <\/span><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">The Department of Labor released fourth quarter productivity figures this morning.\u00a0 Productivity in the U.S. rose by 6.2%.\u00a0 For the whole of 2009 the DoL reported that productivity rose by 5.1%.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Analysis:<\/strong> Increases in productivity are my favorite economic statistic.\u00a0 I consider productivity to provide insight into the ways in which people are learning to do things more efficiently.\u00a0 This is the heart of economic growth and the bedrock that underlies the economy.\u00a0 Productivity is measured as output per hours worked.\u00a0 Output here means the dollar value of good and services a person creates.\u00a0 Given that the economy as measured by GDP grew at 5.7% in the fourth quarter, and the economy is still shedding jobs, the output per hour worked had to go up &#8211; in this case by 6.2%.\u00a0 So this result is not that surprising.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Yet, as I said last quarter, the productivity number is not repeatable in the long-term (3-5 years).\u00a0 The reason is that employees that do have jobs are being worked to the bone.\u00a0 Not only that, but wages are not growing, so at some point your average employee is just going to get plain tired and start to feel unappreciated.\u00a0 Something has to give and that something is that businesses need to start hiring folks.\u00a0 This will reduce the burden of output per employee, lower productivity, improve the employment situation, increase consumer confidence, increase consumer spending, grow the U.S. economy, etc.\u00a0 Or so the domino theory goes.\u00a0 Given my intuition that consumer confidence remains shaky and the new found personality of the consumer <strong>saver<\/strong> I am not sure if we will see the last domino for many years.\u00a0 But <strong>I do know<\/strong> that this productivity figure is not replicable and even if it goes up it will increasingly be a measure of employee exhaustion; leading to decreases in productivity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\"><strong>Importance grade:<\/strong> 5; in a normal period of economic growth this figure would be a 10.\u00a0 But right now, the productivity measure is not really measuring real, sustainable economic growth.\u00a0 Instead it is measuring the ability of business to get blood out of a stone.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">Jason<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Good morning! The Department of Labor released fourth quarter productivity figures this morning.\u00a0 Productivity in the U.S. rose by 6.2%.\u00a0 For the whole of 2009 the DoL reported that productivity rose by 5.1%. Analysis: Increases in productivity are my favorite economic statistic.\u00a0 I consider productivity to provide insight into the ways in which people are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonapollovoss.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}