These trends and their implications are explored further in Chapter 3 . Although spending has increased in current dollars, there has been a slight decline when inflation is taken into account. Industry and federal funding trends are discussed in more detail in chapters 3 and 4 . Observations on the President's Fiscal Year 1999 Federal Science and Technology Budget, National Research Council. However, economists and other experts hold widely different views about key elements of the current economic environment and future trends.
Technology is increasingly central to mainstream economic debates about several key issues.
One issue that has received a great deal of attention is the productivity paradox. 10 Labor productivity is a measure of output per unit of labor and reflects improvements in capital, technology, and skills. Productivity growth ultimately translates into improvements in real incomes and living standards. Growth in U.S. labor productivity, which averaged almost 3 percent per year during the 1950s and 1960s, slowed to less than half that on the average over the 1974-1997 period. In particular, productivity growth in service industries has been notoriously slow despite large investments by service industry companies in information technology.