Name: What Trump and Clinton Failed to Address During Monday’s Debate
Uploaded: 2016-09-29
Duration: 4 min 21 s
Description: It’s kind of a big deal

In the match up between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump earlier this week, accusations and exaggerations flew, and a few facts were thrown in for good measure, but Times, [ UNKNOWN ] says one important number completely overlooked in Monday's debate. Rana, Time's assistant managing editor and the author of Makers and Takers, is back with me now. Rana, so what was the number? Productivity. Productivity, explain what it is. All right, so productivity is in some ways the most important metric in the entire economy, right? GDP growth is basically productivity with demographics added to it. The number of people that you have in an economy And how well they're working, how productive they are. Productivity has been flat in this country for many years now and that's one of the main reasons that you have a slower growth economy, a 2 % economy. And it's interesting, of course, neither candidate really wants to get into this, A, because it's a little bit complicated and wonky, but B because there is not as much the precedence can do about this as they might. It's not like talking about tax policy or trade, it really a deeper issue And we have a trade line that shows it right there. And it's funny, I mean, I feel like I'm working harder than ever, and most of us do. Of course. But it has nothing to do, it's sort of a bigger picture issue than that. Well, you know, there's actually big debate. Why are these numbers so weak? And some people would say, you know, we're just not measuring the figures accurately. If you think about the BLS and what it's set up to measure, you know, it's set up to measure widgets. Stuff coming off of factory- Right. lines, so it could just be that we're not having the right numbers. It could also be that it's taking a long time to filter through the economy, if you look back actually to the industrial revolution, it took something like 50 or 70 years for things like the combustion engine and electricity To really have that productivity now are gonna affect them. You know, with the industrial internet and machine to machine communication, it could be that we are on the cusp of the big growth but we're not seeing it yet. Right. People talk about the tech revolution- That's right. That is only recently that the giant industrial companies are really absorbing that and digitizing their companies But there's another argument here that I find really scary. And it's the One Foot Forth by Robert Gordon. ->> Yes. The economist. Harbinger of doom. And he basically says this boom we're having is not doing anything. Yeah. We've passed our really amazing booms. The other industrial revolutions The tech revolution now Yeah As much as everyone says about it, doesn't come close to what Yeah. [ UNKNOWN ] for our economy. Yeah, yeah. He has this sort of [ UNKNOWN ] ask book of this year, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. It's about 700 pages where he lays all this out, but I'm gonna give it you quickly. I've seen Robert Warden speak and he does little interesting exercise where he asks everyone in the audience to raise their hand. Which would you rather have, your smart Smartphone or running water? Most people would choose the latter. But if you look at the numbers, really what we've seen from the computer revolution in the 70s and certainly from the Internet the web Is nothing in comparison to that earlier technological advanced. So do we boost it? A lot of this is company's and spending. But what else can be done to boost this number? Well, you know the thing that has tied most closely to [ UNKNOWN ] productivity is advancing education. There is a lot of research that shows that as long as education can stay ahead of technology Workers can become more productive. They understand how to use new machinery. I mean, you just look at, say, some of the high tech machine tool factories out there right now. You know, this is robotics equipment that people are using. It's not dirty Work on an old fashioned line. So, you've gotta make sure that workers have those skills. If you go back to politics, that probably argues for physical stimulus around revamping education, infrastructure, workforce training, and companies are indeed starting to do some of that themselves. Although in the last two years, more money has gone say into buy backs and paying back investors Than into that kind of deeper investment. And of the candidates, I mean you mentioned that there's little politicians can do, but this probably argues that Hillary Clinton would be better. It's the one thing, yeah. If you can bolster education, if you can boost infrastructure and tie that to worker training, That would be a good thing for productivity. And what about voters? Do voters register this? I mean productivity. I think one of the interesting bipartisan messages I think that is getting crossed is the fact that we need new infrastructure. We need to tie that to job's training. There's going to be a lot of particularly men out of work. The number one occupation for working class men right now is driving. Driving trucks, driving cars, think about automated cars coming online. A lot of those jobs are gonna go away. You need to have new skills for those people to boost the economy. [ SOUND ]