At first blush, productivity growth would seem to be a very bipartisan, non-controversial issue. Who would be opposed to improving productivity growth? And, as a general topic, it isn’t that controversial. It’s when you get into specifics that the problems start. Kind of like reducing the government deficit: lots of agreement on the general issue, very little agreement when it comes to the specifics.

When it comes deficit reduction, each specific reduction in spending or increase in taxes means that someone is losing. The same is true for productivity growth: with each specific improvement in productivity, someone is losing power or status or an economic benefit. Remember, the key to productivity growth is doing more with less. That’s not easy. What is easy is doing less with more—something bureaucracies are especially good at. Actually, even doing more with more is not much of a challenge.

But doing more with less is quite difficult. Hence, It usually affects one or more groups in a negative way—or at least in a perceived negative way

Let’s take a simple example: cars. The invention of cars (and trucks) was an enormous boost to productivity growth. However, many people fought their development for a long time. Liberals didn’t like it because they turned skilled craftsman-type jobs into boring, machine-like assembly line jobs—much more productive, but much more de-humanizing too. Conservatives didn’t like it because it threatened farm life. People left the farm for cities that often had lower (or at least different) moral standards. Traditional family life was threatened.

Both liberals and conservatives didn’t like the crowded, filthy conditions of a city compared to a farm. Of course, much of these concerns are based on an idealized view of farm life and a more biased view against city life.

But, that is often true when fundamental changes are underway. People are overly negative on the future change and overly positive on the status quo. That’s part of what makes productivity improvement so difficult.

Also, both sides are often quite right in their concerns. There are often big problems with productivity changes. For example, over 2 million people are killed in auto accidents every year around the world. How many were killed in auto accidents in 1850? That’s right. None.

Also, big productivity changes, like the advent of cars and trucks, also create the need for other, often very difficult changes—building roads, for example. That often requires government intervention. If the government is not effective, the roads won’t be high quality. Many of those millions killed each year would not be killed if the roads were better.

So, productivity changes are never single-issue types of change. They usually involved a whole range of changes—often very upsetting and disruptive changes. Cars and trucks without roads aren’t much good at all. Also, a whole industry has to be developed to maintain and fuel those cars. Financing is also very important. All those changing and developing industries require lots of other changes.

So, with all the problems cars and trucks faced, why did they ever get developed? Because the benefits outweighed the costs at each stage. Although people didn’t like the tradeoffs, they came with significant benefits, which increase over time.

That’s true with many real productivity improvements. They are hard to kick off at first, but easier once their benefits are more proven. Still, any further changes needed for productiviity improvements are still highly upsetting and disruptive.

In fact, if a productivity improvement is not the result of some very upsetting and very disruptive change, it probably isn’t a very big increase in productivity.

For example, Facebook may seem like a big change, but from a productivity standpoint, it is primarily a fashion change. Part of the reason there is such interest in Facebook as a company is because it creates so much easy money for those closely involved and causes vey little disruptive change. It’s not like cars and trucks at all. You may or may not like Facebook, but it isn’t very upsetting to most people. Nothing significant is threatened or disrupted.

In fact, in a bubble economy, the easy money related to Facebook actually is very supportive of the status quo. It helps prop up the stock market bubble and, hence, the bubble economy.

Real productivity changes almost never support a bubble economy. In fact, a bubble economy is very negative for real productivity change. Instead of looking for difficult-to-create productivity improvements, investors instead look for fast and easy money: some company that will catch the attention of the market in a big stock market IPO or a big buyer who will pay “stupid money” to buy the new company. All this is highly distracting from investments from real productivity changes, which by definition never create easy money. Real productivity increases are very hard and slow: not a a good source of easy money. You are much better off investing in flipping real estate or flipping a hot stock than investing in a company that is doing the hard work of creating productivity changes that are very fundamental and vey disruptive.

If real productivity increases by 1.5 percent to 2 percent a year, that is fantastic growth. Over a period of 200 years that rate of productivity growth has made the U.S. the wealthiest country in the world. It has also helped many other countries become incredibly wealthy without having to do any work, such as Saudi Arabia. They have always had lots of oil, but until cars and trucks were developed in the U.S. and other major countries, it was of little value.

So you can expect that in a bubble economy, productivity changes will slow as the focus increasingly shifts from investors and entrepreneurs to making bubble profits—which are always far easier than productivity profits.

The only problem with bubble profits is that they are fake and eventually evaporate. All that bubble money goes to money heaven and we are stuck with stalled productivity growth since we did little to increase it during the bubble economy.

Most of the productivity growth during a bubble economy came from the momentum of changes made earlier—deregulating telecommunications or the invention of the integrated circuit. Of course, there are some productivity-improving changes made in a bubble economy, but they are increasingly few since the focus is on easy money, not hard money.

That’s another reason why real productivity improvements are not supported much right now. In order to have a productivity-based economy, the bubble economy needs to be popped. But popping a bubble economy is very unpopular with EVERYONE. No one will pop it. The bubbles will pop only when they can’t go on any longer despite all the support that people around the world will give it.

Once the bubble economy pops, the real work in improving productivity begins. It will be difficult and highly controversial, but it is the only way to create real and lasting economic growth. That is something that everyone will want—but only after the bubble economy pops.

The speed of the recovery will depend on how fast we can implement productivity improvements and how fundamental those improvements are. If there is a lot of opposition to productivity improvements, the recovery after the Aftershock will take a long time. Also, if the productivity improvements are not very fundamental, the recovery from the Aftershock will take a long time.

That is why we set up this website. Although we know that most people are focused on increasing—or at least maintaining—their bubble profits, once all those profits evaporate and the economy is in terrible shape, people will be much more interested in productivity improvements and what this website has to offer.

Of course, when the economy is in terrible shape and capital markets are almost non-existent, that is not a great time to improve productivity. But it is better than today, because people will be much more willing to undergo the wrenching changes that it takes to improve productivity. In fact, many of the economic benefits and power they receive from current status quo will have vanished. The bubble economy will also be gone. Hence, there will be much less to fight for in keeping the status quo and much more reason to fight for change. We very much look forward to that.

Also keep in mind that much of the productivity improvement needed in the near future will have to be focused on healthcare, education and government services, since that represents more than 50 percent of our economy. These sectors have also been lagging behind the rest of the economy in productivity gains.

So we also look forward to focusing on these much more neglected parts of the economy. Most productivity discussions focus primarily on manufacturing. We too will discuss improving manufacturing productivity, but we will also focus on the much larger segments of what is now almost entirely a service-based economy. Of course, those changes will be highly controversial and fought against by almost everyone involved. But, like with cars and trucks, productivity improvements will be implemented in all the segments of our economy because the benefits ultimately outweigh the perceived costs

It will be an exciting time of real change and real achievements. But, like other periods in our country’s history when real change and real improvements were made—such as the American Revolution—the changes will not be easy. We look forward to helping to bring those changes about. It will be an exciting and very productive time.