New Technology, Old Questions: Productivity Puzzles and the Macroeconomy

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At the University of California, San Diego Economic Roundtable, San Diego, California

Thank you, Jim, for that kind introduction, and thank you to UC San Diego for hosting me.1 It is a pleasure to be speaking to this group that includes students, faculty, and business leaders. The topics I want to focus on today are relevant for all of us: How could rapid technological change affect our economy, and what could that mean for monetary policy?

I will start by discussing an earlier period of major technological advances and what lessons we might distill from it for the current juncture. Next, I will turn to what evidence we have regarding the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).2 I will consider how widely these tools are being used, in which sectors, and what recent research tells us about their potential effects on productivity. Then, I will consider the implications of rapid technological change for the economy more broadly, including for aggregate supply and demand, for inflation, and for the labor market. Finally, I will discuss briefly my thinking about the economic outlook and monetary policy.

Productivity Puzzles: Then and Now Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow famously wrote in 1987 that "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."3 He may have been expecting too much from the computers he saw. While 32 percent of workers used computers at work in 1989, the computers were not very powerful.

While that expansion of the IT capital stock directly boosted worker productivity, there was more than that to the IT boom. Businesses also reorganized their operations around computers, which further supported productivity growth.

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