US labor productivity and cost are examined given the on-going discussion of labor’s role in current US inflation. Each measure used in this study has high variability, even on an annual basis. Short term changes should thus be viewed with caution. The rate of increase in nominal (i.e. not adjusted for inflation) cost of US labor has been increasing since 2015. It is higher now than at any time since the late 1980s. Moreover, no long-term upward trend exists in the growth rate of US labor productivity. Caution is thus in order when speculating that the increasing cost of US labor is a temporary event and that artificial intelligence will increase US labor productivity and dampen its cost. Variability of these widely-followed measures is high enough that it would be useful to investigate if changes can be made to the data generation process to reduce their variability.
