The secret to the productivity puzzle? Work fewer hours The UK faces a tough productivity problem. According to the Office for National Statistics, British productivity has improved by just 0.5 per cent per year since 2008, and lags 15 per cent behind other G7 countries. Productivity is measured as value added per hour worked. Obviously it rises if we produce more value – which [...]
Don’t fear a jobs apocalypse: The UK economy is already adapting well to automation The Hollywood vision of a jobless, authoritarian future has the super-rich minority living forever and the rest of the population in dangerous poverty, not able to do anything of interest or value. Possibly in response to this, we regularly hear scare stories from some politicians (for example Nick Clegg in the Evening Standard earlier this [...]