Where has all the productivity gone? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#41

Post by ajuc » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

Is this about productivity measured as economists usually define it (so - value added divided by hours worked)?

It is a very misleadingly named indicator. If you're a barber working in a small village in a poor country you cut hair for 8 people a day for 3 USD and pay 100 USD a month for renting a place and other costs. So your productivity is 20*24 - 100 = 420 - 100 = 320 USD / 160 hours a month = 2 USD/hour.

If you go to a big city in developed country you now take 30 USD per haircut and still do 8 of them a day and pay 1000 USD for rent and other stuff. That results in a productivity of 20 USD/hour. You had become "10x barber" just like that :)

It has nothing to do with how well or fast you cut hair or how "productive" or distracted you are. It's all about the price of labor.

If that's the productivity we're talking about then the answer is "Great Averaging". Every job that could be moved to low-income countries to lower the costs - is. So the cost of labor goes down. Meanwhile land prices and patents and brands remain in high-income countries. So the relative cost of labor is lowered (or at least its growth is artificially slowed down). For people in low-income countries (like me) the "productivity" goes up, for people in high-income countries it goes down. Great Averaging.

A good physical analogy would be 2 containers with water. 1 with hot water and 1 with cold water. When you connect them the water in both changes temperatures in opposite ways. And you can extract work from the temperature difference (that's what the millionaires who do the outsourcing do).

It also increases local inequalities (you get rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries), but decreases the inequality globally.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#42

Post by 3grdlurker » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

failuser wrote: post #31

fhssn1 wrote: post #19

'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (…

Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…

If you have a team of programmers who always miss their deadlines, will increasing the headcount necessarily make them a team that always meets the deadlines? No, because other than having more people means more distractions and need for communication, there might be other problems, such as technical debt, or miscommunicated requirements, or inexperience, or outright unreasonable demands.

The only variable that increasing the headcount necessarily improves is the headcount itself.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#43

Post by guilhas » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

We are at a time where trust is low. People want something govs and companies want something else. Left and right completely entrenched. While we keep fighting each other we waste a lot of time. Because things are changing to fast, so everyone keeps reinventing the wheel

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#44

Post by paulpauper » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #21

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone churning out Tiktok, Clubhouse, and Robinhood while we need more SpaceX and Teslas. I’m unsure how to tilt the equation so solving for hard (necessary) engineering is more profitable (or lower risk) than window dressing.

TikTok, Clubhouse and Robinhood have touched the lives of orders of magnitudes more people than Tesla or SpaceX. Tesla sold half a million cars last year. TikTok provided entertainment for a billion people.

tesla does not exist in a vacuum though.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#45

Post by lostcolony » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

failuser wrote: post #31

fhssn1 wrote: post #19

'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (…

Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…

'10x researches can try out 10x approaches'

Can they though, and is that helpful? Is there sufficient communication between everyone in the field to ensure no one is investigating the same things? Is that still 10x, given the communication overhead in ensuring what you're wanting to start doing isn't already being worked on by one of the 9999 others? Are their 10x as many approaches that can be investigated in parallel at all times?

The lessons from the mythical man month still apply even with research.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#46

Post by reader_mode » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #32

failuser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…

Cancer really isn’t one disease. It’s thousands if not millions or maybe even billions of diseases that share some similarities. The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero, but there’s plenty of opportunity to help sufferers die with rather than of. It’s a game of incremental improvement so it’s likely that greater investment would produce reasonable returns.

>The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero

A way to kill a specific type of cells doesn't sound impossible (zero).

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#47

Post by toomuchtodo » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

dcolkitt wrote: post #21

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone churning out Tiktok, Clubhouse, and Robinhood while we need more SpaceX and Teslas. I’m unsure how to tilt the equation so solving for hard (necessary) engineering is more profitable (or lower risk) than window dressing.

TikTok, Clubhouse and Robinhood have touched the lives of orders of magnitudes more people than Tesla or SpaceX. Tesla sold half a million cars last year. TikTok provided entertainment for a billion people.

I think there’s a disconnect in what we deem to be value. SpaceX has rapidly reduced the cost of lift to orbit (and shortly, revolutionizing global comms via StarLink). Tesla has forced an entire industry (light vehicles) to electrify by demonstrating very little compromise vs combustion vehicles while their stationary storage products are forcing thermal generators off the electrical grid (cannibalizing ancillary/frequency response revenue, the last pieces of significant revenue thermal generators are holding on to). TikTok, Clubhouse, and Robinhood are various degrees of poison (both at the individual level, and the societal level). They're our generation's Philip Morris and Standard Oil (imho).

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#48

Post by fhssn1 » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

failuser wrote: post #31

fhssn1 wrote: post #19

'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (…

Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…

The numbers 1000 and 10,000 are just to make a point. It could be 10,000 vs 100,000. I just don't know.

I've added "beyond a certain point" to 10x. So e.g., increasing from 10 to 100 helps. 100 to 1000 helps. 1000 to 10,000? maybe. 10,000 to 100,000? maybe not. And so on (like approaching diminishing returns). (again the numbers are for illustration, and would vary with the nature of work).

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#49

Post by nixpulvis » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

I'd say there's a Great Desynchronization.

Not only are more and more producers simply out to enrich themselves, but social conditions make workers more and more likely to be at each other over topics unrelated to their work. It plays out like destructive interference in phase, where a massive amplitude in effort is taken on all accounts, but the sum is 0.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#50

Post by skohan » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

> The Great Dissipation.

Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process, and very little real work gets done.

To be honest, I think it might be an inevitability of the productivity boom. Thanks to technology and automation, it's possible for a single individual to accomplish what it might have taken dozens or hundreds of people to do a generation or so ago.

When it becomes possible for for a small subset of the population to create enough value to support essentially everyone else, it it just changes the parameters of the social game we are all playing. When essentially all the manpower is needed to progress society, the optimal strategy is to reward the most productive individuals to incentivize others to increase their own productivity. When there's an excess of productivity, the optimal strategy may be to put yourself in a position to capture the value of those few productive individuals.

But I think it's also something we can try to address via IP law. Currently we don't do a very good job of incetivizing creating something new. The current state of patent law essentially serves to bully small players out of the market who cannot afford to defend against dubious patent claims. Copyright is used as a cudgel to keep small creators from iterating on culture. In a lot of ways, it's fair to see the game as rigged, and to come to the conclusion that it's not really worth it to create something new.

If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the products of their creativity.