In a previous post, the FRED Blog disentangled the general concept of growth in output from growth in hours worked and growth in labor productivity. The key takeaway: Labor productivity growth allows workers to produce more goods and services during each hour of work. The FRED graph above shows the amount of U.S. real output (in green), the overall number of hours worked (in red), and labor productivity (in blue). These quarterly indexes produced by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to measure each concept have been re-indexed to the first quarter of 2020, the start of the COVID-19-induced recession. The dashed ... (full story)