Smartphone Addiction Tightens Its Global Grip

How long is it since you last used your phone? Chances are, you’re using it right now to view this post. Analysts from Statista’s Digital Market Outlook have revealed that the amount of time we’re spending with our smartphones online has increased substantially over the last few years.

You will find more statistics at Statista

The term ‘smartphone addiction’ is by now pretty well-established (you can take a test here to see if you might be a sufferer). As our infographic shows, across the world, this addiction seems to be tightening its grip. Of the countries surveyed, smartphone owners in Brazil spend by far the most amount of time online. The average user in 2016 spent close to 5 hours per day surfing – more than twice as long as in 2012.

Perhaps this explains the collapse of global worker productivity, as we detailed previously, adjusting for the WWII anomaly (which tells us that GDP is not a good measure of a country’s prosperity) US productivity growth peaked in 1972 – incidentally the year after Nixon took the US off gold.

The productivity decline witnessed ever since is unprecedented. Despite the short lived boom of the 1990s US productivity growth only average 1.2 per cent from 1975 up to today. If we isolate the last 15 years US productivity growth is on par with what an agrarian slave economy was able to achieve 200 years ago.

The Answer to the economic dilemma of our time is simple then – “Put The Smartphone Down”… but then again, what will happen to Amazon, Google, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and all the “real” economy drivers behind the stock market illusion?