JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: The best thing that could happen to the American economy just happened.

What’s really exciting is this: Economists have been waiting and wondering when all the tech advances of the past decade — smartphones, AI, big data, drones — would start showing up in the productivity stats. It’s been reminiscent of how economists wondered the same thing about the computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s — right before the 1990s tech boom. But sometimes it take a while for businesses to figure things out. It took more than a half century for steam power to overtake water as the largest power source in Great Britain. It also took about as long for even half of U.S. factories to become electrified after the introduction of the alternating-current electric motor.

One American economist familiar with this history is former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Although frequently cited as one of the key people responsible for the financial crisis, Greenspan in the 1990s was one of the first experts to notice something was up with productivity, much to the skepticism of many of his colleagues and staffers. “In the end, the chairman turned out to be right,” writes economist and former Fed Governor Laurence Meyer in his book A Term at the Fed. “His call on the productivity acceleration was a truly great one.”

So maybe Silicon Valley and the rest of Corporate America are finally resolving the current productivity paradox. (Fingers crossed, though, given the volatility of these stats, especially when you factor in the possible lingering effects of the Great Recession.) If so, it’s of much greater economic importance than anything happening in Washington these days. An innovation boom will make it a lot easier for the economy to grow closer to 3 percent rather than 2 percent.

Fingers crossed.