Hello everyone, I am Kimberly Adams and welcome to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

Akair Rizdall at Stu's Day one show one topic. Today we're talking productivity. We're talking productivity in the pandemic.

We're talking productivity in wine matters. We're talking productivity and economic growth. All aspects of productivity.

We've seen some ups and downs, shall we say, in that particular economic indicator of late.

Right, right now we're seeing what they call historic declines, as in we haven't seen them since like the late 1940s.

And it's not necessarily a new thing. We've had this productivity slowing down for years.

So what we're going to get into today is why is this happening? Should we be worried?

And what does it mean for our economy because productivity is kind of like the thing that fuels economic growth and who knows?

Maybe we'll even talk about quite quitting a bit.

Oh god, do we have to? I'm so sick of tired of that phrase.

Anyway, that's all I want to thank. Here to Make Me Smart today is Quailen Ellen Grood.

She's the director of the McKinsey Global Institute where she leads research on global productivity.

Quailen, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Okay, so let's do some definitions first, right?

Productivity is which is produced per hour work. If you want to get mathematical about it, what is it really though?

And what does it show us?

Yes, productivity is basically output per a unit of input.

And generally at the country level, it means GDP per worker.

So you described widgets per hour at the individual level when we take that up for countries,

GDP per worker is what we typically think about in terms of labor productivity.

And it matters because it basically leads to higher incomes, it drives a richer society,

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