My exchange with Noah Smith about American complacency

Here is one of Noah’s bits:

Smith: OK. I wanted to press you on a couple more things. First, you discuss how productivity growth has slowed down, but you also mention that people might be slacking off a lot more at work. Don’t those two contradict each other? If people are producing the same amount as before in half the time and spending the other half of their day surfing the net, doesn’t that mean true productivity has risen rapidly?

Second, you discuss how matching leads to complacency — how the Internet allows us to find jobs, mates, and consumption goods that are perfectly suited to us, and how this can make us lazy and over-satisfied. But you also talk about how people, especially working-class people, are getting stuck in high-unemployment places. Isn’t better matching part of the solution to the mobility problem?

Here is the whole exchange.

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