1 Measuring Productivity at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics

In March 1927, Ewan Clague wrote that there was “no immediate and exact connection between high productivity of labor in an industry and the wages paid in that industry.”
1
Clague was later referred to “as the nation's chief philosopher of figures” and acclaimed for his “integrity and penchant for accuracy,” which “made him acceptable to both business and labor.” In 1927, however, he was fresh out of graduate school in economics at the University of Wisconsin and had been hired to conduct research on productivity for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
2
He had just published a series of articles describing the productivity of eleven industries and had introduced a new measure of productivity, called the “productivity index,” that laid the groundwork for the various productivity indexes that the BLS still publishes today, most prominently the quarterly Major Sector Productivity index (figure 1.1).