Transcripts For CSPAN2 BOOK TV 20161231

Weve got three days of booktv for you on this new years weekend. Our Holiday Schedule features indepth live on cspan2. Thats just a few the programs you will see on booktv this weekend. For he completes Television Schedule go to booktv. Org. Book tv, 7272 hours of nonfiction books and authors. Were supposed to have a chat. [laughter] that was a good thought you gave, bob, i felt. Let me start out im almost convinced halfway. Let me start at the end. Ive heard this before. Yes. Yes, things are left out of gdp. That is always been true. We are now leaving out the value of wikipedia wikipedia, leavingl these wonderful things. We do pay for smart phones. We pay quite a bit. My cell phone bill is 121 a month for some reason. So its not exactly free, but it does give us lots, i remember how how excited you were when you got your first smart phone. I value it perhaps most of all forgive me something to do in the dark taxis when im driving downtown. But think of all the things that were left out of gdp 100 years ago. The transition from horses to motorcars, the removal of maneuver from the streets. What a boon. The elimination of infectious disease. The conquest of infant mortality. In 1890, 22 of American Children died before the age of one. By 1950 that was down to 1 or less. Joel mentioned leisure something thats left out of gdp. Yes, leisure is left out of gdp but when do we get the biggest change in leisure . Not in the current age. Working hours at the turn of the last century in the 1900s were 660 hours a week in manufacturing. 72 hours a week with the standard shift in the steel industry. They only wanted to run the steel shifts twice a day and i wanted to keep the steel mills going 24 hours a day, so 24 divided by two was 12. They made made the workers work 12 hours a day six days a week. The big decline in average hours of work occurred between 1900 19001940. We still do not duplicate western europe, our vacations. We told only two weeks of vacation. They have five. A bit thats an area where well get unmeasured growth in gdp in the future. Think about Life Expectancy. Journals teacher who was my office mate in graduate school has done a number of stunning papers in his life. One of the most important was called the health of nations, in which he measured the value in terms of consumer goods of increases in Life Expectancy and health. According to his data, the effect of rising Life Expectancy was to more than double the value of all the gains in consumption that were gained in the 20th century. But the rate of improvement of Life Expectancy was twice as fast and the first half of the 20th century as in the last half. Because getting rid of Infectious Diseases was more important than extending peoples lives and all of the wonderful things that have happened since then. So yes, gdp leaves out a lot buf left out a lot back then. I think that something you probably agree about spin of course i agree with that. There is something, however, missing in your account which i would like to point out. And that is you showed us these bars for total effective productivity. Its well understood, basically what we do is factor productivity is look at the growth of output and then subtract off some weighted index of the growth of input. Whats left over is total productivity. Whats important to understand is that if you are leaving out, somehow dont clear the calculation, then your total factor productivity statistics are obviously overstated. I think this is something which we havent paid enough attention to, and there may be some unfortunate ph. D student who went it will revise our National Income account, basically taking into account the fact that a lot of inputs that are important in bringing about output growth are not fully accounted for. Bob mentioned that, what i call right back, and i went to point out that the First Industrial revolution that he talked about is to a large extent based on the use of fossil fuel. So we started out with call and then later 19th century we moved into oil and subsequent into natural gas. Some people basically kegley the cost of these as total amount of labor, capital and all that, bank, you calculate, index subtracted from output, total productivity. But it was not real at the time so they couldnt possibly do it. There are other inputs that were being used up in this, namely its impact on air quality and eventually of course on the very careful balance, ecological balance of the planet. As we go back and start calculating the possible costs of global warming, we just take that out as a cost that had to be paid for that wasnt, maybe the total productivity calculation dont look nearly as rosie as that it did in his bar. So that would be true for almost anything. So antibiotics, grea, great inv, people live longer, fantastic. What wasnt realized at least adequate at the time was antibiotics were built in mechanism because it can to become ineffective and we have to run faster and faster to stay in place. So again these calculations look a bit dicey to me, and lots of growth in the next 50 years will be to some extent to pay the costs this generation didnt pay, in part because the market failed and in part because they just were not aware of it. So thats one thing that make me worry about this productivity comparison. The other thing is, and that kind of takes me back to bobs point about leisure. Yes, we can measure the number of hours people work and what he said is roughly speaking correct. On the eve of world war i, the 1900 1910, the average worker in the western world worked somewhere around 2900 hours per year. Today we are at about 1750, and in europe in some places it is below 1500. People work less, not only that the work a few hours a year but they start later. They end earlier. They had many golden years after they retire except when youre an academic and you go on forever but thats a different story. But what we havent i think fully accounted for is the change in quality of leisure. The choices that people laugh. Not just looking at 250 cable channels, but the hundreds of other things that people can do today. I mean, in the past, leisure, insofar as was available, was fairly dull. People played cards. If you wanted to go to a show into United States you would go to an eyecatching contest that sounds like real fun. Today, the choices that people have in terms of what they want to watch, i can push any button on this cell phone that bob thinks is such a mundane invention here not only that i i can make phone calls and communicate, i can play any mozart allcaps\all caps that it want in 15 different performances. Mozart couldnt do that. Nor can anyone do this 20 years ago. Leisure aint what it used to be. Not all of this is something that an intellectual feels very happy about. One of the interesting papers that came out in the last few months is work by error occurs and others in university of chicago who pointed out participation that bob is worried about is happening because people who should be in the labor force are staying home and playing video games. [laughter] so you think, is this the good news or the bad news . Now wait a minute. I can tell you i know error occurs. I know the paper