The Sirens' Call by Chris Hayes;

Author:Chris Hayes; [Hayes, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2025-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

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Understanding that attention is a finite and scarce resource helps to explain one of the great economic mysteries of the last fifty years, which is why we haven’t seen productivity grow more than it has. In the 1980s, in the early years of the information revolution, economist Robert Solow famously quipped, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”[20] This proved a bit premature, because as the twentieth century ended, we did see a burst of productivity that clearly flowed from the mass adoption of networked computers. But both before that relatively short period and since, productivity growth has been underwhelming, and nowhere near the explosive rates of the middle of the twentieth century, particularly from 1920 to 1970. What has been hyped as a transformational revolution ends up, when compared to the previous era, a bit of a letdown—at least when it comes to growth.

Economists measure productivity in a bunch of ways, but the most capacious measure is “total factor productivity,” which measures not just labor productivity—how many widgets an hour a given worker can produce—but all productivity across all factors of production: how many widgets an hour the entire factory can produce. During the most productive ten-year period of the information age, 1994–2004, the annual growth rate was barely over 1 percent. In the decade that followed it fell to 0.4 percent. From 1920 to 1970 it was near 2 percent per year. The annual productivity growth rate during the middle of the last century was twice as high as that of the peak decade of the information revolution, and it was sustained for fifty years.[21]

Between 1920 and 1970, both our physical world and the day-to-day activities in it were transformed, with the widespread uptake of mass indoor plumbing, electrification, telephones, roads, cars, air-conditioning, commercial air travel, reliable indoor heating, washing machines, and TVs. All the conveniences of modern life emerged during this period. Now compare that to the period from 1970 to 2020. There have been incremental increases in the quality of cars, airplanes, air-conditioning, indoor plumbing, electrification, and indoor appliances, but no real major changes between the basic physical infrastructure of 1970 and today. If you take away computers and cell phones, not much at all has changed.

While it takes just as long to fly across the Atlantic as it did in 1970, computers have gotten faster, much, much, much faster.[22] But no matter how fast a computer gets, how much processing it can do, it’s still interacting with us. We are the president of our lives. Our attention is the limiting condition, and there have been no real breakthroughs that shoot through that fixed limit.

Think of arguably the most successful and transformative company in the history of the digital age: Google. Finding things on the internet before Google was quite difficult. There was too much information and no way to conserve your attention. “Surfing” the net, which is the term coined in the early days, captures the fact that the way one moved through the digital space was difficult, strenuous, and recreational.

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