Chris Johns

And that's particularly true, of course, for industry as well.

And our economies run on energy.

And our industries and our businesses, whether you're in manufacturing or services, they need energy.

And the tech sector needs energy, increasingly so via the whole data center AI thing.

And I think that's going to have an awful lot to do with this U.S.

productivity renaissance.

It has to be said, and I know this from bitter experience, that productivity is something of a mystery.

Once you start thinking about it, another Nobel Prize winning economist said it's very hard not to think about anything else.

We're very sad people, we're economists, but because it just affects everything.

My very first job was a professional economist all the way back in 1980.

Oh my God, Jim, what was that, 46 years ago?

Jesus, Chris.

I was working for the UK government.

This was in 1980.

The task they set me was to do a literature review of both the theory and the evidence as to why UK productivity growth had so mysteriously slowed down post-1973 in the previous seven years.

And I suspect people have been beavering away in UK economics ministries for all those years subsequent to my first doing it, asking the same question and coming up with the same answer.

And the finger of suspicion back in 1980 that I was able to point at was the 1973 and 1979 energy price shocks.

There were lots of other – they weren't the only factors.

There were lots of others.

But the energy price shocks of the 70s contributed to a big slowdown in UK productivity growth, which meant a big slowdown in the growth in UK living standards.