Technological Innovation leads to productivity growth and higher national incomes

• Technological Innovation — defined broadly here to include physical machines as well as ideas, knowledge, and processes — makes it possible for each worker to become much more productive.
• This increase in productivity raises incomes, and eventually shortens working hours.
• A prime example of how tech innovation drives productivity growth is agriculture. Innovations like better machinery, crop varieties, fertilizers, and land management have enabled farmers to be much more productive.
• In the US, for example, farm production per labour hour increased nearly 16-fold from 1948–2011. This increased productivity enables teh US to feed a rapidly growing population, even while the fraction of people working in agriculture is smaller than ever.
• Besides tech innovation, there is evidence that working fewer hours can itself keep productivity higher, making the link between working hours and productivity self-reinforcing.
• Try selecting some countries from the dropdown filter to see how their productivities changed from 1950 - 2017