A mistake about manufacturing costing Americans millions of jobs
The fact that rapid productivity increases due to the computer industry began in the late 1970s is a flashing red light to me.<p>The late 1970s is when productivity and wages began to diverge. Much ink has been spilled about this, as it corresponded with the emergence of neoliberal economics by Reagan and Thatcher.<p>Maybe wages and productivity began to diverge not because labor was capturing less value  due to political developments, but because we have been overestimating the productivity of industry in aggregate due to the rapid productivity growth in one sector, computers, skewing the aggregate.<p>It seems like a statistical misattribution of this scale could be applied to many other phenomena.