Dude your link is whack. Straight-up bullshit.

Average output per person per hour grew at roughly 3 percent annually from the end of World War II to 1973, but has since settled at about half that level, excepting a few boom years in the late 1990s and early 2000s (and a blip in 2010).

It links to a graph from the Saint Louis Fed which is every bit as linear as you and I both know the productivity curve to be.

1945-1973: 24.6-51.4 (about 100%)

1973-2001: 51.4-80.9 (about 80%)

2001-2017: 80.9 -108 (about 40%, but also half the time span)

Productivity is up. Period. Efficiency is also up.

Your article effectively says "the problem is that bear over there. It's gonna kill us. How are we going to kill the bear?" While pointing at a dead bear.

In the late 1990s, oil was dirt cheap.

Mutherfucker we're within 25% of that right now.

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That out of the way:

Right, so what the world needs to do is ask the question "Why are we getting 1.4% when we're used to getting 3%?"

What do you think that looks like? I think it looks like the people who can afford to go "my potential gains are not commensurate with my potential losses" going to cash, and the people who cannot go "we'd best make hay while the sun shines." Everybody I follow who does personal finance is screaming cash, while everybody I follow who does institutional is talking about 1-month and 3-month signals and where to maximize right the fuck now. It's fundamentally a tragedy of the commons problem - an individual investor cannot fix an economy whose investment returns are half what they're used to; all they can do is lower expectations (which gives your business to the people willing to lie to their clients) or chase alpha.

I think we are literally watching the investment class grapple with this very problem. I think their solutions take as base the fact that it's unfixable. And I think the whole world wouldn't be piling into crypto if they could get satisfactory returns out of conventional investments.

So it would seem obvious (if we take his sage advice) that the tax code is forgiving of bubble investing and doesn't encourage real business investment (in productivity, i.e. making things).

You can solve this by inspection:

Something between 74% and 80% of that is in retirement accounts and therefore sheltered. Compare and contrast: our business is taxed every year on our equipment. Yeah - not the year we purchased it, every year. Our nitrous machine? Our county gets a bite of that every year for seven years. Our business loan? Taxed as income on our pass-through. Interest on that loan? not deductible. So yeah - if you want less small business, tax it more. If you want more Americans playing the ponies with their retirement funds, tax it when they hit retirement age.

I'm a white male entrepreneur with a lot of experience with pass-throughs. More than that, our business gets better the more people are on Medicaid. More than that, the fewer people with insurance, the more people pay our cash-pay (because it's about 15% what a hospital costs). I fuckin' hate the Republicans and I fuckin' hate Trump and I would gladly roll it all back if I could. But the tax bill is almost written for me. No state income tax deduction? No worries! WA has no state income tax! Personal taxes at the expense of pass-throughs? No worries! I've wound up and wound down like six of those in the past ten years! Private school tax waivers? Fuck yeah! Got one of them, too!

But I look around my neighborhood and they're fucked. Totally fucked.