Just over a year ago I wrote a post suggesting that slow productivity growth in the current recovery might have something to do with the changing demographic composition of the US labor force and the significant structural changes in the US economy following the 2008 financial crisis and downturn. Here’s how I put it last year.
I don’t deny that secular stagnation is a reasonable inference to be drawn from the persistently low increases in labor productivity during this recovery, but it does seem to me that a less depressing, though perhaps partial, explanation for low productivity growth may be available. My suggestion is that the 2008-09 downturn was associated with major sectoral shifts that caused an unusually large reallocation of labor from industries like construction and finance to other industries so that an unusually large number of workers have had to find new jobs doing work different from what…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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