Where is the business investment?
UBS's Paul Donovan thinks he might know the answer: consumer spending.
Donovan's theory, from a research note circulated on Wednesday, is that the number of people working for themselves has risen, as has the use of the same technology at both work and home. When you buy a laptop for your house, but also do work on it, that's considered consumer spending, not capital expenditure.
From Donovan:
The fact that a tablet has to be wrestled out of the hands of a five year old child playing games before it can be used for inventory management does not deny the value of that tablet as capital stock. However, if an individual uses their own computer or tablet for work purposes, statistics will generally classify the investment as consumer spending not capital spending. For the self-employed or small business, the incentive to use the existing capital stock of their own personal (consumer) technology is very great.
Over at FT Alphaville, Izabella Kaminska goes further, connecting this convolution of purposes in technology to an ever-greater mix of work and life:
...compare and contrast today's standard corporate provisions for personnel compared to those of 40 years ago when labour markets were tight: no more tea trolleys, no more company cars, no more travel subsidies, no more lunch subsidies, no more over-time, no more lunch hours, no more tea-breaks, no more work-life balance.
The most heinous of these turnarounds being the sheer volume of additional over-time our technological devices now empower without any incremental increase in worker salaries - more often than not in the most inappropriate working environments as well?
It's my own personal theory that workers will eventually hit a breaking point, and may end up turning this around. The response to the ever-increasing demands of factory work was labor organizing. I wonder if there will be a great upheaval. I don't think that we're ever going to go back to the days of separate technology for business and personal use - the internet is the end of that.
But I think there's some hope for the future of leisure time.
In my own personal experience - someone who came into the working world smartphone in hand - I was very aware of the fact that if I wanted to separate work and leisure time, that was my responsibility. But I realized early in my career that creating those boundaries make me more productive at my job when I am on. And that's an important realization.