Tim Harford explains why the first world’s productivity gains have stalled and even gone into reverse since the Apple iPhone was introduced:
A few weeks before Christmas, an impish chart appeared on the Bank of England’s unofficial blog. It compared plunging productivity with the soaring shipments of smartphones. Typical productivity growth in advanced economies had hovered steadily around 1 per cent a year for several decades, but has on average been negative since 2007. That was the year the iPhone started to ship.
Nobody really believes that the iPhone caused the productivity slowdown — a more obvious culprit would be the global financial crisis — but it is hard to find people who think that their phones are an unalloyed blessing. If in 1968 an economist or computer scientist had been told that 50 years later we would all be carrying wirelessly networked supercomputers in our pockets, he or she would have been staggered at the potential. I doubt they would have realised quite how much time we would spend liking Instagram posts, playing Pokémon Go and sending each other digital interruptions.
The costs of this distraction are starting to become apparent. I wrote recently about the research of Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine. Prof Mark argues that reorientating yourself after an interruption tends to take between 20 and 25 minutes. We all know how a moment’s inattention can turn into a clickhole of distractions. She also points out that once we get used to being interrupted by others, we start interrupting ourselves, twitchily checking email or social media in the hope something interesting might turn up.
