Re: article on oil & dollars

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

> The economy's performance in the second half of the decade [the 1990s] was considerably better, but much of the acceleration in growth was simply due to increased depreciation-the output needed to replace worn out or obsolete equipment and software. Net domestic product (NDP)-the Commerce Department's measure of usable output-grew at a rate that was nearly half a percentage point less than the growth rate of GDP in the second half of the decade. In the boom years of the late nineties, NDP grew only slightly faster than it did in the seventies, and far below the rates of the fifties and sixties. <
 
from http://www.cepr.net/stock_market/new_economy_goes_bust.htm
 
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine 

________________________________

From: PEN-L list on behalf of Daniel Davies
Sent: Sun 2/27/2005 10:24 PM
To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] article on oil & dollars



Jim do you have a reference for where Dean says this?  It looks like a very
important point, since one of the big things that happened around that time
was the introduction of hedonic adjustment in the computer industry, and
since it's always seemed to me that the flipside of what they were doing
with hedonic adjustment of the price of new computers would have to be a
reduction of the effective useful life of a computer.

best
dd

-----Original Message-----
From: PEN-L list [mailto:PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Devine,
James
Sent: 28 February 2005 04:29
To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: article on oil & dollars


Dean Baker argues that US productivity growth has been exaggerated, since
depreciation also sped up. If you adjust for the latter, US productivity
growth doesn't look as good.