Both. Read this:
One benefit of the long and painful recession is that companies and organizations have figured out how to become more efficient and “do more with less,” and that is reflected in the fact that GDP per U.S. worker went from $91,365 (in 2005 dollars) in the fourth quarter of 2007 to $96,231 in the fourth quarter of 2010, an increase in worker productivity of 5.32 percent. Perhaps those impressive gains in labor productivity over the last several years help explain why we are now experiencing a “jobless recovery” with a stubbornly high unemployment rate—companies have been able to expand output without hiring very many, if any, additional workers.
We're producing more with fewer workers. This is a good thing if it is driven by markets. Unfortunately this has been driven not by markets but by state regulation and fear thereof. France has very productive workers, just very few of them. This is because France (and increasingly the US) makes employing workers expensive. This results in employers economizing on employees by investing heavily in technology and excluding the youngest and least productive workers from the workforce. The result is lots of productivity with lots of un- and underemployment.
In the past the US' unregulated economy delivered both high productivity and high employment. The fact that we are only able to achieve one is a logical consequence of shifting from free market to corporatist economic policy. Becoming France is not an achievement. It is a disaster.
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