LESS WORK + MORE PRODUCT = PRODUCTIVITY:

To paraphrase Solow, productivity gains are everywhere except in the productivity statistics.

Think for a moment about the technology you use in your personal and professional life; consider how much more you can do in a given span of time thanks to technology; the integration of mobile wireless and information services, the Internet, software and apps and what it all allows you to accomplish each day compared with the recent past.

I wager that your personal experience overwhelmingly suggests productivity gains are everywhere despite the lack of hard data.

Analysts at the BLS looked at this in 2014. They noted in a report some rather intriguing data: employees "in the U.S. business sector worked virtually the same number of hours in 2013 as they had in 1998--approximately 194 billion labor hours . . . there was no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year period, despite the fact that the U.S population gained over 40 million people during that time, and despite the fact that there were thousands of new businesses established during that time."

That 15-year period also saw a 42 percent increase in real output; American businesses produced $3.5 trillion more in goods and services (in real terms) in 2013 than in 1998.

As a nation, how can we have such a massive increase in output without an large increase in productivity? Technology must be part of the answer; the other part probably is a measurement issue.

Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of global fixed income at BlackRock, calls today's slow productivity growth "a statistical mirage." He further observes that "traditional economic metrics simply haven't kept pace with fast-changing technologies geared toward greater efficiency at lower cost."

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