New business practices are really driving productivity. But one of the great ironies of the information age is that although we have more fine-grained data about the economy, we know less about the true sources of value than we did before. There are many ways companies are adding value to the economy, but it’s often showing up as greater consumer value rather than in GDP.

A striking example is the music industry, which as a share of GDP appears to be shrinking, because its revenues are getting smaller. But the amount of music people are listening to is not getting smaller. There are more downloads of songs and more people listening than ever before. The issue is those downloads have a very low price, often zero price, so they don’t show up in our GDP statistics. Does that mean consumers aren’t getting the same enjoyment from them? No. It just means we’re not measuring the value properly.