“The Dynamo and the Computer: A Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox”, 1990-05-01 (; backlinks; similar):
Many observers of recent trends in the industrialized economies of the West have been perplexed by the conjecture of rapid technological innovation with disappointingly slow gains in measured productivity. A generation of economists who were brought up to identify increases in total factor productivity indexes with “technical progress” has found it quite paradoxical for the growth accountants’ residual measure of “the advance of knowledge” to have vanished at the very same time that a wave of major innovations was appearing-in microelectronics, in communications technologies based on lasers and fiber optics, in composite materials, and in biotechnology…This latter aspect of the so-called “productivity paradox” attained popular currency in the succinct formulation attributed to Robert Solow: “We see the computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
…If, however, we are prepared to approach the matter from the perspective afforded by the economic history of the large technical systems characteristic of network industries, and to keep in mind a time-scale appropriate for thinking about transitions from established technological regimes to their respective successor regimes, many features of the so-called productivity paradox will be found to be neither so unprecedented nor so puzzling as they might otherwise appear.
…Computer and dynamo each form the nodal elements of physically distributed (transmission) networks. Both occupy key positions in a web of strongly complementary technical relationships that give rise to “network externality effects” of various kinds, and so make issues of compatibility standardization important for business strategy and public policy (see my 1987 paper and my paper with Julie 1988). In both instances, we can recognize the emergence of an extended trajectory of incremental technical improvements, the gradual and protracted process of diffusion into widespread use, and the confluence with other streams of technological innovation, all of which are interdependent features of the dynamic process through which a general purpose engine acquires a broad domain of specific applications (see Timothy Bresnahan and Manuel 1989). Moreover, each of the principal empirical phenomena that make up modem perceptions of a productivity paradox had its striking historical precedent in the conditions that obtained a little less than a century ago in the industrialized West, including the pronounced slowdown in industrial and aggregate productivity growth experienced during the 1890–231913111ya era by the two leading industrial countries, Britain and the United States (see my 1989 paper, ppg12–15, for details). In 1900, contemporary observers well might have remarked that the electric dynamos were to be seen “everywhere but in the productivity statistics!”