By Sasha Rogelberg
Publication Date: 2026-04-19 14:58:00
In 1987, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow made a stark observation about the stagnant development of the information age: After the advent of transistors, microprocessors, integrated circuits, and memory chips in the 1960s, economists and businesses expected these new technologies to disrupt the workplace and lead to a surge in productivity. Instead, productivity growth slowed, falling from 2.9% between 1948 and 1973 to 1.1% after 1973.
Newfangled computers actually produced too much information at times, creating painfully detailed reports and printing them out on reams of paper. What had promised a boom in workplace productivity has been a bust for several years. This unexpected result became known as Solow’s productivity paradox thanks to the economist’s observation of the phenomenon.
“You can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics,” Solow wrote in one New York Times Book Review Article from 1987.
Data on how the C-suite…
