Mr. Gilder noted, “The scarcest resource is time, which always becomes scarce as other things become abundant. It is human genius that transcends the scarcity of time.” That’s economic productivity in a nutshell.
I spoke to Mr. Gilder last week for an update. He’s a big fan of time prices, “the one impeachable standard to compare abundance from one era to another era. How many hours does it take a typical worker to earn a set of goods and services?” It turns out that “all goods and services from the private sector are radically cheaper in time prices, while government services are the one function that has actually increased in cost in most cases.” Why am I not surprised?