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Where has all the productivity gone?

johndcook.com

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Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#81

Post by xondono »

falsaberN1 wrote: post #75
xondono wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>This makes you a rare example. I’ve been saying for years that the real computer revolution will happen when people work with computers, rather than on computers. Heh, it's funny you mention that, because I always had a deeply rooted philosophical belief that computers are tools, and a properly configured computing device is an "extension" of oneself. Not in some crazy cyberpunk sense of extension, but same as regul…

I try to do the same, for me WSL has been a godsend, because at work I’m forced to work on windows (a lot of engineering tools are windows only, and some of them don’t work nicely even with fully virtualized environments).

Having the scripts I use on my linux machine close has made my life easier.

To my surprise, even very technical and knowledgeable people don’t do this. For example, at work we log our time of entry and exit (in Spain this is required by government). I built a simple workflow that uses my phone location and automatically fills the log for me. Coders in my team, which I have shared the script with, are still logging each day by hand.

I think it’s more of a mindset than something that requires any particular skill.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#82

Post by username90 »

3grdlurker wrote: post #57
cercatrova wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No but increasing the number of teams who are all now competing with each other would probably allow us to see progress scaling with the number of teams, not necessarily putting everyone on the same team.

Science discoveries don't just happen because there are more people "competing" to solve a problem. The more likely outcome of what you're saying is that you'd only have more teams competing, sure, but to redo each other's work.

They don't even compete to solve the problem, they compete for funding. People who are better at politics gets more funding, so adding more people could even be net negative with them draining up all the funding from those who do the actual research.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#83

Post by karatinversion »

skywal_l wrote: post #71
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP doesn't take into consideration public debt. If public debt is up 100% and GDP has barely changed - I don't think that's cause for celebration that GDP / hours worked = we are more productive. I'm not saying this is the case. But people use GDP a lot to make points like this - and it's important to talk about how much public debt is increasing GDP.

If you are in a country where pensions are managed by the state, your contributions are considered taxes. If you are in a country with a private pension system, your contributions are in the GDP! The GDP is not a scientific measure. It is an ideological concept. It doesn't mean it is useless, but it should not be taken at face value.

Taxed income isn’t subtracted from income in national accounts though...?

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#84

Post by rdiddly »

egypturnash wrote: post #3

The 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.

Acknowledging receipt of the King Missile reference!

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#85

Post by strictfp »

satyrnein wrote: post #64
MattGaiser wrote: post #24

> The Great Dissipation. One of the shocks about entering the world of work was how little I often got done in any given day because I was in a meeting or had to deal with some form or was waiting on permission or many other things. I have had whole days disappear with nothing much to show for them at the end. I am sure I am not the only one. And even though it is almost assuredly known that this happens, nobody seem…

Meanwhile, one of the great shocks that I experienced when becoming a manager was that I had no better solution to keeping a large group of people aligned and unblocked than a bunch of meetings. Sure, I tinkered around the edges a bit, but it's not fundamentally different. Solutions welcome!

Maintain a backlog for them, at least an idea backlog

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#86

Post by lkrubner »

robjan wrote: post #2

There 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…

Those are PPP numbers, which means they are a total joke. The graph you post does not show the post war boom, nor does it show the productivity stagnation after 1973. The USA went from 3% per year productivity growth, before 1973, to 1.5% productivity growth after 1973. None of that is visible in the chart because the chart is using PPP numbers.

But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on computers, and so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to productivity?

See:

The Solow Productivity Paradox: What Do Computers Do to Productivity?

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa...

McKinsey wrote this in 2018, predicting a productivity boom was coming soon, though of course this prediction has been made often since 1973, and the only time it was even slightly true was during the boom in big box retail 1995-2005:

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital...

It's well known that in the 1800s the telegraph and then the telephone allowed a large scale re-organization of capital, and capital invested heavily to take advantage of the new technologies, but it was impossible to see a productivity benefit. These technologies allowed new systems of control, but not necessarily any productivity benefit. Since 1970 computer network technologies have offered a similar reorganization, but they are vastly more powerful than the telephone, and they allowed a re-organization that was vastly more profound than any previous reorganization of capital. Millions of jobs were outsourced to India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and then Brazil, Russia, Romania, etc.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#87

Post by trhway »

colinmhayes wrote: post #78
toomuchtodo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cocaine triggers a dopamine response (simplified, I dated someone with an addiction). Is that a positive impact? Moderation is important, as in reflection as to why you’re enjoying something and if it's healthy.

If cocaine was free I think it'd have a tremendously positive impact.

cocaine was cheap and easy available a century+ ago (for example the original Coca-Cola was an over-the-counter headache treating mix which contained alcohol and cocaine). Didn't lead to much positive impact. (Note: i'm for full unlimited legalization, though not because it is that good, it is just that 1.the adults have the right to practice Darwin theories and 2.the Prohibition is really bad)

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#88

Post by egypturnash »

rdiddly wrote: post #84
egypturnash wrote: post #3

The 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.

Acknowledging receipt of the King Missile reference!

<3

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#89

Post by egypturnash »

breck wrote: post #53

6) We've made laws that greatly restrict our abilities to use these magical new technologies in their most productive ways. Google Books was the canary in the coal mine. Remember when Google was going to organize all the world's information and make it accessible and useful? Then the copyright lobby attacked, and over a decade later that project (which is so obviously a quantum leap in terms of what it could do for h…

And the problem here is that writing a good book on a thing is something that takes time and effort. Usually enough that it's a full-time or part-time job.

While I am no fan of the copyright maximalism that Disney and other corporations employing armies of people doing work-for-hire have turned copyright law into, I am also a person eking out a living as an artist, and I would like to be able to say "please don't use this thing I made to promote viewpoints inimical to my existence, please don't sell copies of this thing I made without asking my permission first and working out licensing terms", and even "please don't reproduce this thing at all without giving me some money". And I would also like to continue to make enough money off of my work for my bills to be paid. I've found that Patreon's enabling me to give a lot of stuff away, but if I wanted to make some of my work a scarce good, that's a choice I'd prefer to be able to enforce in the courts.

Or perhaps more succinctly: if you want information to be free, you need to figure out how to free its gatherers, tenders, and creators from worrying about their bills.

If you think you have a better idea for freeing information-creators from worrying about their finances than "Kickstarter/Patreon except XXX" or "put ads on all the things", then you might have a project worth chasing.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#90

Post by coldtea »

robjan wrote: post #2

There 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…

>There is a huge assumption here that productivity isn't increasing, which is false.

Actually the assumption in the post is the exact opposite: that productivity has increased.

The question it poses then is "so what do we have to show for it?".

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