Technology has boosted the productivity of sectors like manufacturing and agriculture, driving down the relative price of their outputs, like TVs and food, and raising average wages. Yet TVs and food are not good substitutes for labor-intensive services like healthcare and education. Such services have remained important, just like constructing buildings, but have proven hard to make more efficient. So their relative prices have grown, taking up a larger share of our income and weighing on growth. Acemoglu, Autor, and Patterson confirm using historical US economic data that uneven innovation across sectors has indeed slowed down aggregate productivity growth.[3]
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