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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
A quick Economics 101 refresh: Growth — and the increases in incomes and living standards that come with it — is a function of just two things, a larger labor force and how much each worker produces. More workers increase the overall size of the pie. But individuals don’t get a larger share unless each worker produces more.
For thousands of years, humans suffered from little innovation and saw little change in standards of living. Then, around 1500, productivity started to grow as farming methods became modestly more modern. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the beneficent effects of the Industrial Revolution took hold thanks to extraordinary innovations such as mechanized looms (famously attacked by the Luddites) and steam power.
Later, innovations such as the telegraph, the telephone, railroads, the internal combustion engine and the commercialization of electricity produced a golden age of productivity growth that carried on into the 20th century.
A quick Economics 101 refresh: Growth — and the increases in incomes and living standards that come with it — is a function of just two things, a larger labor force and how much each worker produces. More workers increase the overall size of the pie. But individuals don’t get a larger share unless each worker produces more.
For thousands of years, humans suffered from little innovation and saw little change in standards of living. Then, around 1500, productivity started to grow as farming methods became modestly more modern. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the beneficent effects of the Industrial Revolution took hold thanks to extraordinary innovations such as mechanized looms (famously attacked by the Luddites) and steam power.
Later, innovations such as the telegraph, the telephone, railroads, the internal combustion engine and the commercialization of electricity produced a golden age of productivity growth that carried on into the 20th century.
