— Macintosh user Virginia Postrel really puts her foot in her mouth in this essay on productivity in the New York Times (Lessons in Keeping Business Humming, Courtesy of Wal-Mart U.)
“Surprisingly, the primary source of the productivity gains of 1995 to 1999 was not … information technology … though companies accelerated the pace of their I.T. investments during those years,” reports a summary of the findings published in The McKinsey Quarterly. “Rather, managerial and technological innovations in only six highly competitive industries — wholesale trade, retail trade, securities, semiconductors, computer manufacturing and telecommunications — were the most important causes.”
When academic economists come out with crap like this you wonder if they’ve ever held a job in the Real World. The industries listed in the McKinsey report Postrel derives this derivative essay from are the most highly info-systems-dependent ones in the entire economy; they are able to make their “managerial and technological innovations” because they have networks of computers that feed back vital information about buying trends (“sell-through”) to the warehousing, shipping, and purchasing operations that keep the enterprise humming. This is exactly what info systems are about, when they’re not used for blogging. What a completely idiotic opposition she sets up.