|Washington, DC|4 min read
As with many a miracle, onlookers disbelieved their eyes at first. For a decade after the global financial crisis of 2007-09 rich-world productivity growth was, by historical standards, deadish. Since prosperity depends on the ability to produce more with the same labour, this consigned even America to eternal stagnation (and don’t ask about Europe). The Congressional Budget Office, a fiscal watchdog which consistently overestimated productivity growth in the 2010s, has been consistently glum this decade (see charts 1 and 2). Partial data hinting otherwise were dismissed as false prophets.
This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The Lazarus effect”
From the May 16th 2026 edition
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