📈 Back to the Nineties? My chat (+transcript) with economist Skanda Amarnath on the 2020s productivity outlook

The American economy is growing, and, in many ways, it’s looking a lot like the 1990s. Upward trends in productivity growth and employment paired with downward trends in inflation are cause for optimism. The question is whether we will maintain this trajectory or be derailed by this emerging era of uncertainty.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Skanda Amarnath about trade policy, fiscal and monetary policy, AI advancement, demographic trends, and how all of this bodes for the US economy.

Amarnath is the Executive Director of Employ America, a macroeconomic policy research and advocacy organization. He was previously vice president at MKP Capital Management, as well as an analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In This Episode

* The boomy ’90s (1:24)

* Drivers of growth (7:24)

* The boomy ’20s? (11:38)

* Full employment and the Fed (22:03)

* Demographics in the data (25:37)

* Policies for productivity (27:55)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

The boomy ’90s (1:24)

The ’90s stand out as a high productivity growth, low inflation, high employment economy, especially if we look at the years 1996 to the year 2000.

Pethokoukis: What got me really excited about all the great work that Employ America puts out was one particular report that I think came out late last year called “The Dream of the 90’s is Alive in 2024,” and hopefully it's still alive in 2025. By ’90s of course you mean the 1990s.

Let me start off by asking you: What was so awesome about the 1990s that it is worth writing about a dream of its return?

Amarnath: The 1990s — if you're a macroeconomist, at least — had pitch-perfect conditions. Employment was reasonably high, we achieved the highest levels of prime-age employment relative to the population. We had low and declining inflation, and that variable that we use to say, this is the driver of welfare over time, productivity outcomes, the amount of output we can spin up from finite inputs, was also growing at a very strong rate, and one that we haven't really seen replicated since or really in the decades before.

The ’90s stand out as a high productivity growth, low inflation, high employment economy, especially if we look at the years 1996 to the year 2000. We'd had high productivity maybe even afterwards . . . but that was also a period where a lot of that productivity was gained from the recession. When employment falls really quickly, productivity can go up for illusory reasons, but it's really that ’90s sweet spot where everything was kind of moving in the right direction.

Obviously, over the last several years, we've seen a lot of those different challenges flare up, whether it was employment during Covid, but then also inflation over the last few years. So . . . a model to build towards, in some ways.

Some of us — not me, and I don't think you — remember the very boomy immediate post-war decades. Probably many more of us remember the go-go 1990s. One thing I always find interesting is how gloomy people were in those years right before the takeoff, which is a wonderful contrarian indicator that we had this period [when] we appeared to have won the Cold War but we had a nasty recession early in the decade, kind of a choppy recovery, and there was plenty of gloom that the days of fast growth were over. And just as we sort of reached the nadir in our attitudes, boy, things took off. So maybe that's a good omen for right now

If we're a contrarian, and if the past can be present, maybe that is a positive indicator to consider. In some ways, it's a bit surprising how much you hear the talk about growth [being] stuck in a very low-growth environment. Over the last two years, we have seen above-trend real GDP growth, above-trend productivity growth. We're going to get some productivity data revisions tomorrow. Again, this measure of productivity is output per hour, so it's basically, to a first approximation, real GDP divided by hours worked. We've seen that the labor market has, largely speaking, held itself up over the last few years, and yet, at the same time, real output has accelerated.

So that's at least something that suggests better things are possible. It's a sign that productivity can accelerate, and with the benefit of revisions tomorrow, we are likely to see at least . . . I'd say if you take a fair reading of the pre-pandemic trend on productivity growth, so five to 15 years, maybe you want to include the financial crisis and what happened before, maybe you don't, but you end up with something like 1.4 percent is what we were seeing. 1.4, maybe 1.45, that's a pretty generous view of pre-pandemic productivity growth.

I would like to do better than that going forward.

I would too. And since 2019 Q4, with the benefit of data revisions, until now, we're likely to see something like 1.9 percent — 50 basis points higher, 0.5 percent higher, we could ideally like to do even better than that. But it's 0.5 percent better over a five-year horizon in which whatever labor market weirdness spanned Covid, we've largely recovered from that. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that have changed between now and five years ago, but at least