Why productivity growth is slowing

Solari Report

Catherine Austin Fitts- Productivity growth is indeed slowing.  One reason why is that productivity growth has been focused on making our military industrial complex more powerful, our corporate production more efficient and some investors richer, while ignoring the various economic steroids used to generate that increase in “productivity”: destruction of the natural environment, explosions in personal and government debt and debasement of our civic and cultural life and institutions. We are calculating output while ignoring what is happening in the planetary balance sheet.

Official calculations of productivity growth also ignore the enormous sums of money, time, and energy being spent to control and destroy human productivity systematically – from the tactics of surveillance and disaster capitalism to “divide and conquer politics.” And let’s not forget the $40 trillion disappearing in the financial coup d’etat ending in the bailouts, more than $1 trillion spent annually on military and weaponry, as well as the explosion of prisons and funding for police states.

Nor is “productivity growth” necessarily shared with the people who create it. Since 1948, while productivity growth in America has increased by 254%, labor hourly compensation has increased by merely 113% having essentially flat-lined since 1973.

Is there human incentive to increase corporate productivity? There is not, because increasingly too many large institutions and businesses have a negative total economic return. At the heart of the matter – (1) we need to realign “return to shareholders” with “total economic return” in a manner that produces significantly more wealth. And (2) we need government finances to respect the laws and regulations related to financial management.  Indeed, we have no choice now that the debt growth model is finished. We can’t use more government debt to fund corruption and the externalities of unsustainable behavior.