This is Planet Money from NPR.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money Summer School.

I'm Stacey Vanix-Meth.

And this class, this is a special one.

It is really hard to believe, but the summer is very nearly over,

and this is our very last summer school class.

It's making me a little sad, but we've got a great show ahead of us

full of amazing economics, fire, actual fire, and the long-awaited diploma.

We'll talk about that a bit later, but for now, I am so thrilled to introduce

for the very last time our summer school professors, our guides,

extraordinaire through the hallowed halls of macroeconomics,

economist Kristen Brody, and Luigi Sengales.

Hey guys, hello.

Hello, what are you?

This feels like a fitting last episode, because we're,

this piece that we're about to hear, it deals with something that I feel like

is sort of like the holy grail of macroeconomics.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it is productivity.

I feel like this is one of the sort of the central tenets of macroeconomics.

So productivity is about how we produce the goods and services that people buy

and how long it takes to produce them and how technology can speed that process up,

right, that with computers and automation, things can be done much, much faster.

...