As you may have noticed, the nation’s economists are in a gloomy mood and warning of tough times ahead. Our standard of living stopped rising a decade ago and, they tell us, it won’t improve much in coming years unless we really lift our game.

Just this week one leading economist, Chris Richardson, predicted that real household disposable income per person – a common measure of living standards – wouldn’t get back to the temporary peak it reached in 2021 until 2037.

Illustration by Simon Letch

Why are our economists so downbeat? What’s worrying them? Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve already heard about it – ad nauseam. The main thing that drives our material standard of living is ever-improving “productivity”.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve used improvements in technology and education to make the economy’s output of goods and services grow at a faster rate that its inputs of raw materials, labour and capital. That is, we’ve made the economic machine a bit more efficient every year.

What’s worrying the bean counters is that this process of steady improvement seems to have stalled lately. There’s been no improvement in our productivity. They expect this lull to be temporary, but they have good reason to fear that the annual rate of improvement will be a lot slower than it used to be.

Whereas Treasury’s forecasts of economic growth used to assume that the productivity of labour would improve at an........

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