GDP Per Worker
The government publishes the time series of real (that is, inflation-adjusted) GDP — gross domestic product — in Historical Statistics of the United States. You can construct a picture of long-run economic growth by taking the time series for real GDP from Historical Statistics, splicing the series onto contemporary estimates of current GDP, and then divide GDP by the number of workers in the American economy to arrive at an estimate of how the economy’s per-worker productive potential has changed over time.
Annual GDP includes all consumption goods and services produced (those bought by households for their own use), all investment goods purchased by businesses to expand their stocks of productive capital, and all goods and services purchased and used by the government.
As of the end of 1999, forecasts of US GDP in 2000 put it at $9,300 billion, which with 142 million workers (employed plus unemployed) comes to an annual real GDP per worker (measured in dollars of the year 2000’s purchasing power) of $65,540. Back in 1890, the spliced-together time series from the Bureau of Economic Analysis tells us that GDP in 1890 (at the year 2000’s prices) was $300 billion. With an 1890 labor force of 21.8 million that translates into an annual real GDP per worker in 1890 of $13,700.
The semi-official time series tells us that material standard of living and potential economic productivity at the start of the third millennium was nearly five times what it had been only 110 years before: a rate of per-worker real economic growth of 1.4% per year. And if we adjusted for the decline in the working year since 1890, we would find a six to sevenfold increase in measured per-work hour real GDP. According to these estimates, an American household with six times the median family income back in 1890 — a household as wealthy and as high up in the relative income distribution then as a household with an income of $300,000 today — was no better off in measured material welfare than the average American household today.
“Cornucopia: Increasing Wealth in the Twentieth Century” by J. Bradford DeLong