In Jamaica we have a nickname for almost everybody. If you have a specific habit, or physical feature, or a particular trait, then someone at school or in the community will find you a name that sticks for life. If you are short, it’s Shortman or Shortie. If you are tall, it’s Tallman. If you’re plump, it’s “Thickazz”. As a nation we excel at labelling everything around us with brutal and colourful honesty. Yet, ironically, we are haunted by a pestilence that has no nickname, no identity, but is a silent parasite in our lives that we have simply accepted as “how things run a Jamaica”.
This plague is our productivity crisis, and the most dangerous thing about it is that everyone thinks it belongs to someone else. If you ask the average person about productivity, they point to a government agency with long lines, bureaucratic processes that take several working days, and the frustrating requirement for a Justice of the Peace (JP) to sign the most basic and routine documents. If you ask a business owner, they point to the high cost of electricity, waiting in long lines at the bank, “unskilled” labour pool and poor work ethics. If you ask a worker, they point to traffic congestion, low salary, excessive meetings that could be emails, and outdated tools. Productivity is seen as a “them” problem, not a “me” problem.
While everyone is quick to point fingers, no one is taking accountability or steering the wheels of change. This goes beyond the “Anonymity of Productivity.” It’s a 40 year old ghost that’s extremely problematic because it legitimises a nation of people working harder in a system that is fundamentally broken, turning our tough won fiscal stability into a glorified stable poverty trap.
The “Busy ness” Delusion
We have a cultural obsession with hustling. So, we mistakenly equate sweat with value. Because we are exhausted at the end of the day, we assume we must have been productive. But productivity isn’t a measure of fatigue; it is a measure of output value.
In simple terms, if you spend eight hours digging a hole with a spoon, you are terribly exhausted, but you aren’t productive. If you spend one hour digging that same hole with a backhoe, because you focused on the task and didn’t stop to check your phone every 15 minutes, you are highly productive.
Unfortunately, because we don’t name productivity, we don’t realise that most of us are digging with spoons every day. We don’t ask for better tools, we don’t seek better methods, and we don’t invest in the skills that turn a backhoe. We just keep digging harder and wondering why the hole isn’t getting any deeper.
Good Enough is the Enemy of Great
Let’s take it a step further: when a business owner doesn’t realise they have room to be more productive, they stop innovating the moment they become profitable. They look at their 25 per cent margin and think, “me reach”, not realising that a competitor in a more disciplined market is hitting 40 per cent because they’ve automated their inventory and optimised their logistics. Indeed, they don’t need to constantly hike prices, passing on their inefficiencies to customers every 180 days.
The consensus among Jamaica’s leading academics in this area is that we suffer from a chronic productivity paradox. Despite decades of high investment and now near 96 per cent employment, total factor productivity has remained stagnant or negative since the 1970s. And this is not because of our lack of effort but institutional friction, including a high cost, low trust environment where red tape and dead time is an invisible but painful tax, which also creates a ceiling on wages. As my former lecturer Professor Alvin Wint argued, a business cannot pay first world wages on third world efficiency.
It is said that productivity is killed by a thousand small cuts — the meeting that starts 20 minutes late, the “link” you have to call to get a standard licence or permit or document signed. The car loan that takes weeks to be disbursed, and the property sale that takes almost a year to conclude. Our dilemma is that we don’t view or name these as productivity failures; we instead say “just suh it guh.”
The requirement for a Justice of the Peace (JP) to physically witness and sign documents is an enduring productivity “rat trap” that taxes the country’s most valuable resource: time. When hundreds of thousands of citizens are forced to spend half a day on transportation and physical “legwork” for a single signature, the aggregate loss to the nation’s Total Factor Productivity (TFP) is billions. We have become a society that excels at navigating obstacles instead of a society that removes them.
But the friction starts at the top. We see it in the government minister who is constantly late for meetings and events, modelling blatant disregard for the country’s most finite resource. We see it in leaders who spend hours in performative meetings with no tangible outputs, while their security detail sits idling in a luxury vehicle outside. For hours that engine runs, wasting taxpayers’ petrol, money, and the time of the personnel involved. This “leadership by idling” sends the clearest message that time has no value here.
One of the consequences of not naming our inefficiencies is blaming the “brain drain” on a lack of patriotism, rather than realising that our talent will continue to leave for environments where their time is actually valued and leveraged.
True productivity requires a cultural shift that looks inward at how we spend our hours. We see it in the woman who spends four hours at the hair salon every other week, trading half a work day for a temporary aesthetic. We see it in the man who spends hours mindlessly scrolling social media, engaged in circular political debates that change nothing, or the youth rubbing out his hand middle with weed in the middle of the day, mistaking an inebriated state for “holding a meds.” We see it in the hours of scrolling TikTok for the latest drama.
We call these personal choices; but their nicknames should be wealth sucker. These are the micro leaks in the national engine that impoverish us. When our leisure time is purely consumptive and our work time is performative, the speed or velocity of business grinds to a halt. We have normalised a low output lifestyle where “killing time” is a national pastime, failing to realise that time is the only capital we truly own. If we were maximising our resources and executing with the efficiency of a neighbour like Barbados, our GDP would be closer to US$150 billion, not US$24 billion, and our per capita income would be upward of US$50,000, not US$8,000.
One love,
Yaneek Page is the programme lead for Market Entry USA and a certified trainer in Entrepreneurship.
