We need to track more than GDP to understand how automation is transforming work | collaboration | Scoop.it

“... measures like GDP and productivity as eternal truths of economics and, indeed, they have proved their worth over time. Nonetheless, some of them are not only reasonably recent inventions, dating from around the second world war, but are designed to measure activity in an economy of mass manufacturing, a sector increasingly being displaced by the information economy as the primary source of global wealth. This means the measures themselves are also increasingly irrelevant.

This is a huge wake-up call for governments and businesses around the world who are proving slow to engage with the changing nature of work and who have tended to hide behind the mantra of “jobs and growth”, as if that will take care of everything. It is a reminder to all of us that we are long way from understanding what the future of work really looks like.

“Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating and exploring. None of these fare well under the scrutiny of productivity. That is why science and art are so hard to fund. But they are also the foundation of long-term growth.”