Where has all the productivity gone?
johndcook.com
Where has all the productivity gone?
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Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#2There is a huge assumption here that productivity isn't increasing, which is false. Economic output per hour worked has been steadily increasing in every country since their respective industrial revolutions.
When you go to the source tweet, it turns out that it's comparing the developed world to the developing world. Developing economies will always grow faster, but not necessarily efficiently, because there's more low hanging fruit to pick. These low hanging fruit can be picked by throwing more people at the problem (increasing workforce participation or working longer hours).
One example is how much more time it takes to build infrastructure in America vs China. If you look at the data[0], productivity in both countries is growing at roughly the same rate. It pretty much invalidates the assertion in the blog and the source tweet.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#3The Great Disparity In Income surely has nothing to do with it. If the boss is making absurd multipliers of your income and barely paying you enough to get by, the last thing you wanna do is get your work done as fast as possible. Pad those hours, give yourself the raise the boss never will. Take stuff from work.
Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#4There is a huge assumption here that productivity isn't increasing, which is false. Economic output per hour worked has been steadily increasing in every country since their respective industrial revolutions. When you go to the source tweet, it turns out that it's comparing the developed world to the developing world. Developing economies will always grow faster, but not necessarily efficiently, because there's more…
As much as I dislike Chinas ruling party, their government is a model of efficiency when compared to the USA and it mostly gets out of peoples way. Contrast that with US government where taxes, vehicle registration, and judicial process is perhaps decades behind despite having more resources. There is something about complacency common to all democracies that never up well. The old refrain "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time" applies just as much today.
Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#5Productivity compared to which time in the past? If we compare productivity today compared to say 1960/1950 then we have definitely improved. We can manufacture at speed & scale. We can communicate with people across the continents like never before. We can work-from-home to a large extent than ever before. We can destroy each other at much grander scale like never before.
But like any system, any improvement in efficiency results in shifting the bottlenecks. It never truly goes away. The nature of the bottleneck may be different but its there. The things like "forms, compliance, process" are the new bottlenecks.
Technology is a means to an end. It cannot be the end itself (at a macro level). Tech is by humans, for humans and of humans. Humans will always be the centerpiece for time to come (unless AI becomes so good as they potray in sci-fi films/tv-series).
Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#6> This is what happened with the introduction of household appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for example, we do laundry more often.
I have thoroughly debunked this commonly referenced saying. I don't have a washer and a dryer any more and I can't go into laundromats because Tide delivers a chemical burn. (Even with 2 empty loads in a row.) No, I hand wash all my clothes and it takes way longer than if I did my laundry 5 times a week in my house if I had the machines.
Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#7There is a huge assumption here that productivity isn't increasing, which is false. Economic output per hour worked has been steadily increasing in every country since their respective industrial revolutions. When you go to the source tweet, it turns out that it's comparing the developed world to the developing world. Developing economies will always grow faster, but not necessarily efficiently, because there's more…
> These low hanging fruit can be picked by throwing more people at the problem (increasing workforce participation or working longer hours).
I haven't read the article yet, but note increasing workforce participation or working hours doesn't increase productivity - that just increases the denominator for the productivity calculation, and unless it increases the numerator faster there is no productivity increase.
Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#8The Great Disparity In Income surely has nothing to do with it. If the boss is making absurd multipliers of your income and barely paying you enough to get by, the last thing you wanna do is get your work done as fast as possible. Pad those hours, give yourself the raise the boss never will. Take stuff from work.
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Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#9I find it hard to agree with the article.
With the escalation of technology the amount of things I get done every day, like, tangible, countable things, has skyrocketed, even more as my education with that technology went up. Not just programming and admin stuff, that includes stuff like art (cheaper, takes less time, gets nicer results) which some people argued would never ever be a replacement for traditional art (I still do some traditional things but I don't have shelves full of materials anymore). Not to mention new avenues like 3D modeling, I don't need a huge studio and large chunks of rock to create a 3D figure anymore, and there are ways to make it a real sculpture if I wanted. Music composing, I don't need several hundred dollars in instruments anymore (nor a complex soundproof studio). I don't need rooms full of machinery to make code or plan complex network arrangements, etc. And for the things that still need to be done the old way©, there are better tools, information and whatnot.
Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and homebrewn programs. Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the third point in the article ("The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt I'm special in any way. It's not like the past had no distractions, and I'd argue distractions in the past were harder to dismiss (having to personally travel to X place to do Y paperwork instead of resolving that with a quick phone call or digital process).
Sure, the pandemic made a few disasters in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy turning extremely slow, but I'd blame that more on poor organization than a side effect of technology.
Re: Where has all the productivity gone?
#10I think people are doing more work than ever, but that doesn't mean the work is useful.
Think about how much easier it is to build a SaaS or something vs. even just ten years ago, but that doesn't mean that the new stuff being built will bring economic value.
In fact we might expect there to be diminishing returns in terms of what delivers real utility and thus improvements in productivity don't translate to a similar increase in wealth generation.