ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, leaders in both the private and public sectors became concerned by major declines in the nation’s annual rate of growth in productivity and the apparent loss of competitive position relative to other nations. In 1989, the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity concluded,
While everyone seemed to understand that the United States was facing significant “productivity problems,” there was considerable disagreement about their causes and magnitude. Various factors were cited as causes of the decline in American productivity-from an erosion of the work ethic to the decline in S.A.T. scores tied to the number of hours of television watched, and from the decline in spending for research and development to the increase in divorce rates [2]. While it was obvious that the United States had not been keeping pace with its former rate of growth in terms of productivity and, in many areas, was lag-
historians argued about whether that was bad, not so bad, or even meaningless.
