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    Productivity Surges 2.3%, Beating Forecasts

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    The NewsProductivity grew at a 2.3 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday, surpassing economists’ expectations. The pickup was a major improvement upon the sluggish 0.4 percent rate in the first quarter. And on a yearly basis, productivity increased 2.7 percent. That far exceeds prepandemic averages.An assembly line at a car plant in Michigan in April.Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesWhy It Matters: A key to prosperity.A highly productive economy generally means businesses and workers are operating efficiently, making more money in fewer hours. In the second quarter, production was up 3.3 percent, while hours worked rose 1 percent.On a less technical level, productivity is best explained by the old axiom of “doing more with less” or the folksy virtue of “getting the biggest bang for your buck.”Economists tend to sigh with relief when they see productivity gains because it offers a potential “win-win” for workers, customers and business owners: If businesses can make more money in fewer work hours, then — according to basic economic logic — they can presumably make more dollars per hour, while also reinvesting and giving workers raises, without sacrificing profits.Being able to make more with less (or with the same amount of labor and machinery) also means businesses may not feel as much pressure to set higher prices to push profits. That, too, is welcome news after a yearslong bout of inflation.Facts to Keep in Mind: A volatile indicator.Productivity, at a basic level, is calculated as a simple ratio: the total amount of output an economy produces per hour worked by its labor force. But the output side of the equation is adjusted for inflation on a quarterly basis. That can cause volatility, in both directions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dear Elites (of Both Parties), the People Will Take It From Here, Thanks

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      I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Honey, I Love You. Didn’t You See My Slack About It?

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      Some couples are using professional project-management software to maintain their relationships. Why does it bother other people?Ben Lang didn’t expect to get so much hate just for being organized. For the past three years, he and his wife, Karen-Lynn Amouyal, have been using Notion, a popular software tool, to optimize their household and relationship. His version of the tool, commonly used by businesses to manage complex projects, functions like a souped-up Google Doc, with sections for a grocery list, to-do lists and details of upcoming trips.More unusual is a section Mr. Lang, a venture capital investor who previously worked at Notion, created about principles (“what’s important to us as a couple”). Another section, called “Learnings,” outlines things the couple have discovered about each other, such as their love languages and Myers-Briggs test results. There’s a list of friends they want to set up on dates. They also maintain a log of memories from their date nights. Mr. Lang, 30, was so proud of the creation that last month, he started promoting a template of the setup to others. “My wife and I use Notion religiously to manage our day-to-day life,” he wrote on X. “I turned this into a template, let me know if you’d like to see it!”The internet responded with a venomous outrage. “People have told me my wife is cheating on me, people have told me I have a dead body in my basement, people have told me I’m autistic,” he said.But his approach isn’t entirely unusual, especially among people who work in the tech industry and want to manage their personal lives the same way they manage their professional lives. For a class of young workers, it’s only rational to apply the tools of the corporate world to their relationships and families. Businesses have goals and systems for achieving them, the thinking goes. They get things done.Anastasia Alt, 35, uses Kanban boards — a visual tracking system where tasks progress from left to right — in Trello, a project management tool, for “literally everything.” This includes work at Yana Sleep, her e-commerce start-up, but also planning trips and events with her partner. The two of them also have a dedicated Slack work space, named after a mash-up of their surnames with a logo created using the artificial intelligence software Midjourney. She acknowledged, in jest, that some of her systems were “a little psychopathic,” but said she’s always been an optimizer.Ms. Alt said the Slack work space has emotional benefits for her relationship, too: freeing up their text messages and in-person conversations for the fun stuff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Will A.I. Boost Productivity? Companies Sure Hope So.

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      Wendy’s ordering kiosks. Ben & Jerry’s grocery store freezers. Abercrombie & Fitch’s marketing. Many mainstays of the American customer experience are increasingly powered by artificial intelligence.The question is whether the technology will actually make companies more efficient.Rapid productivity improvement is the dream for both companies and economic policymakers. If output per hour holds steady, firms must either sacrifice profits or raise prices to pay for wage increases or investment projects. But when firms figure out how to produce more per working hour, it means that they can maintain or expand profits even as they pay or invest more. Economies experiencing productivity booms can experience rapid wage gains and quick growth without as much risk of rapid inflation.But many economists and officials seem dubious that A.I. — especially generative A.I., which is still in its infancy — has spread enough to show up in productivity data already.Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, recently suggested that A.I. “may” have the potential to increase productivity growth, “but probably not in the short run.” John C. Williams, president of the New York Fed, has made similar remarks, specifically citing the work of the Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon.Mr. Gordon has argued that new technologies in recent years, while important, have probably not been transformative enough to give a lasting lift to productivity growth.“The enthusiasm about large language models and ChatGPT has gone a bit overboard,” he said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How One Tech Skeptic Decided AI Might Benefit the Middle Class

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      David Autor, an M.I.T. economist and tech contrarian, argues that A.I. is fundamentally different from past waves of computerization.David Autor seems an unlikely A.I. optimist. The labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is best known for his in-depth studies showing how much technology and trade have eroded the incomes of millions of American workers over the years.But Mr. Autor is now making the case that the new wave of technology — generative artificial intelligence, which can produce hyper-realistic images and video and convincingly imitate humans’ voices and writing — could reverse that trend.“A.I., if used well, can assist with restoring the middle-skill, middle-class heart of the U.S. labor market that has been hollowed out by automation and globalization,” Mr. Autor wrote in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper published in February.Mr. Autor’s stance on A.I. looks like a stunning conversion for a longtime expert on technology’s work force casualties. But he said the facts had changed and so had his thinking. Modern A.I., Mr. Autor said, is a fundamentally different technology, opening the door to new possibilities. It can, he continued, change the economics of high-stakes decision-making so more people can take on some of the work that is now the province of elite, and expensive, experts like doctors, lawyers, software engineers and college professors. And if more people, including those without college degrees, can do more valuable work, they should be paid more, lifting more workers into the middle class.The researcher, whom The Economist once called “the academic voice of the American worker,” started his career as a software developer and a leader of a computer-education nonprofit before switching to economics — and spending decades examining the impact of technology and globalization on workers and wages.Mr. Autor, 59, was an author of an influential study in 2003 that concluded that 60 percent of the shift in demand favoring college-educated workers over the previous three decades was attributable to computerization. Later research examined the role of technology in wage polarization and in skewing employment growth toward low-wage service jobs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Our “Great” Economy Is Making Young Americans Grumpy

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      As a part-time commentator on things economic, I’m often asked a seemingly straightforward question: If the economy is so good, why are Americans so grumpy?By many measures — unemployment, inflation, the stock market — the economy is strong. Yet only 23 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, a strong headwind for President Biden’s approval ratings. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s formidable base of disgruntled voters endures.As I’ve engaged with my many interlocutors, I’ve concluded that voters have valid reasons for their negativity. In my view, blame two culprits: one immediate and impacting everybody, and another that particularly affects young people and is coming into view like a giant iceberg. Both sit atop the leaderboard of reasons for the sour national mood.While inflation has provided the proximate trigger for unhappy feelings, an understandable grimness about our broader economic prospects, particularly for younger Americans, is playing a major part. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Our Assumptions About the Maternal Instinct

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      More from our inbox:The ‘No Labels’ Plan for a Centrist AlternativeSupport Us at WorkBaseball, FasterA Billionaire’s Giveaway Csilla KlenyánszkiTo the Editor:Re “The Pernicious Myth of Maternal Instinct,” by Chelsea Conaboy (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 28):My husband and I are two dads who raised a boy and a girl from birth to adulthood in small-town America.As gay dads, we got to pull back the curtain of the assumptions about maternal instinct. I showed up at the Mommy and Me music classes, the P.T.A. meetings and the informal klatches waiting at school for the kids at 3 p.m.When our kids came to us as newborns, I worried that we, as two men, might not be as naturally nurturing or “motherly” as a woman would be. But observing the many moms in action, I was disabused of that fear.The range of parenting was huge. Quite a few moms were not particularly “maternal” at all. Even though most were good parents, many were impatient, cold, sharp-edged. Several clearly had never wanted children.Would I say that, on average, the moms were more “nurturing” than the dads? Yes, and I won’t wade into the debate over how much of this is hormonal rather than cultural. But the bell curve was huge, as with all gender assumptions, and quite a few dads were more nurturing than the average mom.I also recall feeling, when I held my newborn daughter against my naked chest, capsules of fierce, inexplicable parental love bursting in my bloodstream in a way I’d never experienced. I later read a study of gay men whose oxytocin levels soared to levels similar to that of nursing moms when they held infant babies to their bosom. Perhaps we should start calling it “parental instinct.”Ken DorphSag Harbor, N.Y.To the Editor:Oh, hurray, another gloomy take on mothering in 2022. “To become a parent is to be deluged” … “brutal” … “a rock at the ocean’s edge, battered by waves and tides and sun and wind.” Come on, really?Maybe the reason that today’s writing on motherhood so often describes it in terms of various degrees of torture is that many young mums, to their great credit, and having read chapter and verse on the subject, try to do the job perfectly. Then they torment themselves when they can’t.The good news is that there is no such thing as perfect mothering, just good enough mothering, and that is manageable by most. Welcome to the ranks, moms. Rest assured you are doing a good job. Bless you all, and, dare I say it, have fun.Margaret McGirrGreenwich, Conn.To the Editor:Chelsea Conaboy seems to dismiss the “myth” of maternal instinct because it has been misused by some to limit the role of women in society. Nonsense! Because it has been misused is no reason to reject the importance of this most wondrous of emotions.Who cannot be awed and deeply respectful of the mother elephant, tenderly using her trunk to help her newborn stand, or of the mother dog or cat as she tends to her newborn pups after birth, licking off the birth membranes and carefully positioning them for nursing. Has anyone seen a father do that? And yet, I doubt that there has been a cabal of animal fathers scheming to assign this task to the mothers. Why should humans be any different?Thank God for maternal instinct.Robert H. PalmerNew YorkThe ‘No Labels’ Plan for a Centrist Alternative Samuel Corum for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “If an Alternative Candidate Is Needed in 2024, These Folks Will Be Ready,” by David Brooks (column, Sept. 5):To the Editor:David Brooks tells us that a new political group called No Labels may offer a way out of our political crisis. He writes, “If ever the country was ripe for something completely different, it’s now.”He did not ask the simplest and most important question: Where does its money come from? If we are truly ready for something new, then the first principle is transparency about sources of funding. Much of No Labels’ money comes through super PACs, which means that donors can give very large amounts, shape the group’s goals and preserve their anonymity.To accept the worst of American political abuses — ones brought to us by Citizens United — is, by definition, not to make a clean new start.Steven FeiermanPhiladelphiaTo the Editor:The idea of a No Labels presidential candidate is destined to fail. A better challenge would be for all candidates to commit themselves to choosing a vice president from the other party. Now that, in David Brooks’s own words, would be “something completely different.”Lawrence RosenBar Harbor, MaineSupport Us at Work Lily PadulaTo the Editor:Re “So You Wanted to Get Work Done at the Office?” (Business, Sept. 12):While there is more discussion about what makes a productive work environment, this isn’t a new issue for many of us who are neurodivergent, disabled, burned out or healing from trauma.We have been acutely aware of how difficult it can be to operate in a workplace that doesn’t support personal sensory needs — lights, sounds, temperature, positioning, etc.Unsupportive work environments can affect employees’ focus, job satisfaction and productivity. We must normalize communication about sensory experiences in the workplace, and that can also promote inclusion and equity for all.Let’s go beyond thinking that this is just a pandemic-related issue. This problem has been present and it will continue because we all have sensory, emotional and cognitive needs. The workplace is just one important setting where we notice them.Nicole VillegasPortland, Ore.The writer is an occupational therapist and a teaching professional at Boston University.Baseball, Faster John Minchillo/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “M.L.B. Bans Shift, Adds Pitch Clock and Enlarges the Bases” (Sports, Sept. 10):So, just like that, Major League Baseball has decided to join the fast-paced and restless world in instituting, among other changes, a 15- or 20-second timer between pitches. The thinking goes that this will yield a more action-packed and less stagnant game.That’s a shame. Don’t get me wrong: I work in the technology start-up sector and am well accustomed to the incessant movement, constant productivity and “go go go” mind-set of our modern world.But I’m also a psychiatrist who understands the restorative power of mindfulness and meditative experience. And baseball, with all its beautiful pauses and inherent stillness, has provided me with just that from a very young age.David Y. HarariBurlington, Vt.A Billionaire’s GiveawayYvon Chouinard founded Patagonia in 1973.Natalie Behring for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Billionaire Gives Away His Company to Fight Climate Change” (Business, Sept. 15), about the founder of Patagonia transferring ownership of his company to a trust and a nonprofit organization:Billionaires should be a very rare thing! But even as we rightly congratulate Yvon Chouinard for reducing their number by one with his visionary benevolence, let’s not forget that his money will be doing the job our own government should be doing, if only it were allowed to operate as intended by taxing the wealthy and redistributing the funds for the benefit of all.Elisa AdamsNew Hyde Park, N.Y. More