Appreciate your detailed feedback.
I re-read it, and I'm going to think about how I could communicate such a complex topic better.
At the same time, with writing, there is no one size fits all approach. There are lots of tradeoffs to make that will make it appeal to certain people more or less. It sounds like this article just wasn't a good fit for you. At the same time, I am getting a lot of feedback that it resonates with others. That's just the nature of any writing.
At one point, the article was 30,000+ words as I explored all of the nuances and perspectives. This was clearly too long for an article, so I made it into a series.
The hard part of doing this is that every article doesn't reflect all of the research I've done or all of the nuances. And subtracting nuance has tradeoffs. For example, many of the comments on this article are pointing out nuances that they feel weren't expressed.
At the same time, if I included all of the nuance, it would be an encyclopedia article no one will read.
For example, I collected 30+ explanations so far of people/experts across fields to explain the productivity paradox. You can see a rough, evolving version of my notes here (in case you're interested in geeking out):
I also constructed an integrated framework that shows the relation between science, capital, technology, management, culture, government, and side effects of productivity. But, that is in a separate article that is unpublished.
The purpose this article wasn't to make a case for why the productivity paradox happened or to provide a framework, but more so to point out that it is happening and it's worthy of our attention. And to start a convo... like this one.
Some other articles I have written in the series go deeper on potential reasons why the productivity paradox might have happened that aren't often discussed. They're below...
