I'm not talking about the total increase of productivity, I'm talking about the roughly 20% it increased beyond where it would have been if the pre-95 trajectory had continued. I.e., the excess. It just doesn't seem like a plausible explanation.

EDIT: going back and looking at the actual numbers rather than eyeballing it's more like 10-12% excess. That's across the entire economy of course, so it would still be a massive increase to attribute that mostly to a subset of retail and finance sectors.

I have a research assistant I hire to deal with FRED for me, since it is really its own specialty, and at some point we will get to the productivity numbers, but I'm not going to engage them simply for a comment on Hacker News. I probably should not be writing on Hacker News, I keep thinking that I should focus my efforts elsewhere. But eventually I'll have more complete work to share with you and the world. Feel free to follow my blog, you'll see an announcement at some point in the next 6 months.