FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Why Are American Workers Growing Less Productive? For most of the last year, employees haven’t been getting as much done with their time at work. What’s happening?

The worker productivity rate is gauged by the output of goods and services produced for each hour worked. Ultimately, a decrease in that rate suggests that Americans are working more to create less. When held against more uplifting recent economic news, including the 500,000 jobs created in the past two months alone and a perking-up of wages, lower efficiency could have a surprising bite, potentially lowering long-term income and living standards, as well as encouraging the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low.

So what gives? Well, according to one economist, it has little to do with social-media-inspired slacking off and more to do with workers having outgrown existing technology. “We have an $18 trillion economy,” explains Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, whose book The Rise and Fall of American Growth came out earlier this year. “Most of it is operating by the same business methods and procedures that have been in place for at least 10 years.”

Maybe. But workers are always less productive under socialism.