I can tap my smartphone and a cab will arrive almost immediately.  Another tap will tell me the latest news, value my share portfolio, or give me route directions to  my next meeting. I can instantly find the time of a train to York, the weather in New York, download a rail ticket and receive  a boarding pass for my flight. As a result, I don’t need to stand on street corners vainly trying to hail a taxi, queue at a check in desk, lose myself in London streets, or miss my train. I can chat to friends, or arrange a loan, while appearing to pay attention to a dull meeting.

These changes have occurred in the last decade, and it is trite to observe that they have changed the way we live.  From an economic perspective, what we have done is to increase, at virtually no cost,  the efficiency of household production.  Trying to account for this kind of development is the considerable challenge the Chancellor has given Sir Charles Bean in asking him to review how official statistics are compiled.

The data framework within which economic analysis is conducted is largely the product of the Second World War.  In the 1930s, the American economist Simon Kuznets began to elaborate a system of national accounts.  That work was given impetus when the war led governments to take effective control of major sectors of economic activity. It  was soon realised that this required far better data than had previously existed, and that raised the challenge of how best to structure such information.

The framework of national accounts constructed then, and the indices and other tools derived from it, have been the basis of data collection by statistical agencies around the world ever since.  The United Nations has provided a forum for international standardisation.  And yet the wartime origins of the processes linger into current practice. Output is essentially a matter of quantities – you needed to know the volume of steel production, the number of guns, the rate at which tanks and planes roll off the assembly line.  We still use gross national product as our primary measure because when you are facing a deadly foe it is gross, not net, output that will enable you to repel him. In desperate times, you do not measure depreciation.

Household production – women’s work as home makers – didn’t get much of a look in; that was not the front line against fascism. The joke about the man who reduced national income by marrying his housekeeper, so that a market transaction became part of household production, was once a mandatory part of every introductory course on national income accounting, but has succumbed to political correctness.  (In fact the introductory courses on national income accounting have gone as well, because no one much wants to teach them, which is one reason why Sir Charles’ review is necessary).

Technological advance has always enhanced household as well as business efficiency. Our domestic productivity has benefited from washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and central heating, and before that from electric light and automobiles.  But at least these things were partially accounted for: from an economic perspective a car is a faster and  cheaper horse.   Statisticians might in principle have incorporated these improvements in efficiency in their measurement of productivity, though in practice they didn’t try very hard.

But the technological advances of the last decade seem, perhaps to an unusual extent, to have increased the efficiency of households rather than the efficiency of businesses. An e-reader in the pocket replaces a library, and all the world’s music is streamed to my computer.  We look at aggregate statistics and worry about the slowdown in growth and productivity.  But the evidence of our eyes seems to tell a different story.