Americans Top Productivity Charts

According to the wsj economics blog:

The International Labour Organization, in a study released today, puts the U.S. at the top of the global charts for productivity last year measured as “value added” per person employed each year: $63,885. The next-closest were Ireland ($55,986) and Luxembourg ($55,641). (The productivity figure is calculated largely by dividing a nation’s gross domestic product by the number of people working.) In a separate measure, value added per hour worked, Norway topped the ILO list ($37.99) followed by the United States ($35.63) and France ($35.08).

This is notable.  Even though the rest of the world is catching up, the US still has an edge.  I have no choice but to wonder however what the “distribution” of worker productivity is?  If we were to graph the worker productivity against “value added” per person, would we see a nice standard normal curve like we could hope?

I have to believe that is not the case.  I think that the US has been eroding away at the middle class long enough that we would begin to see a “double hump” distribution in which we were beginning to resemble Fritz Lang’s Metropolis rather than the land of the free and the home of the brave.  In my personal experience there is a gulf growing between “laborers” and “thinkers” which seems deeper and deeper every year.  I am fortunate to be in the IT industry, and even more fortunate to be employed to do interesting thinking that benefits my employer.  My “value added” quantity would be difficult to gauge, but it would probably be orders of magnitude greater than the standard quantity.  But I am not unique in this, there is a great number of other thought workers in the trenches who do the same, who’se individual contributions are greatly going to pass the $63,000 barrier described above.

Then again, maybe this is simply a mis-perception on my part, and the stratification of worker value add has always existed, and it is simply through my in-situ perception that it seems notable or interesting.  Though I can’t help but feel that the gulf between the brains and the hands is wider and wider than ever.