Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#111

Post by jldugger » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

wantsanagent wrote: post #106

I take issue with the basic assumption of the article. Sustained productivity growth is hard and would not have continued without the software revolution. Let's take a look at agriculture. https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/march/agricultural... Mechanization and the widespread adoption and improvement of mechanized farming has lead to staggering productivity / farmer growth over the last 70 years. But there i…

And TFP is a real monster of a formula[1]. It's not just GDP / hours. There's like 20 variables going into it's calculation, including things like 'labor quality' and 'capital's share of income' (alpha).

I'm not a smart man, but I think this suggests that a society that lays off factory workers and retrains them as software engineers will not register on this metric. And looking at alpha, there's a pretty clear phase change at 2000 -- it's hovering at 31-33 for 50 years, then marches up from 0.31 to 0.38. Sounds to me like you could tell a story that labor is more productive, but seeing less of the gains than before.

edit: just to belabor the point, here's a random chart I googled for US productivity that _doesn't_ feature the same trendline: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity. If anything it looks like productivity has accellerated during the past 20 years.

[1]: https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/indicators-data/tota...

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#112

Post by Upgrayyed_U » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:01 PM UTC

isomorph wrote: post #98

pbronez wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You never save money building it yourself This comes up in the DIY Audio community. It seems like the economic value proposition is very sensitive to what commercial segment you compare against. You absolutely can't beat low-end, mass-produced speakers on price, but it's easy to beat high-end, boutique speakers on price while getting close on quality.

Where can I find out more about this community?

Search for audiophile forums on the net. Most will have a dedicated area for DIYers.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#113

Post by tshaddox » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #31

Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue. Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the spectrum. Same observation. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administrati…

> On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administration not have become more efficient because of computers?

Is the claim from those books that the administration of small colleges has not become more efficient because of computers? I would have guessed that there are far fewer employees (per student) doing clerical work at small colleges now than before office PCs were ubiquitous.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#114

Post by cxr » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

kiba wrote: post #100

ilammy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I remember Elon Musk saying, the best part is no part. IIRC, the saying originates from Mikhail Koshkin who designed the T-34 tank, often extended with “...but the essential function still performed”.

That may be so, but it doesn't prevent people from relearning concepts.

The original comment citing Musk was fine. The followup comment citing Koshkin was fine. There was no adversarial subtext in the second comment. No defense of the first comment was (or is) needed.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#115

Post by Retric » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

wefarrell wrote: post #107

swalsh wrote: post #18

This is off topic a bit since the article was really talking about something tangently different, and it's probably a really unpopular thing to say, but it's been in my mind for a while. If you look at the worlds population growth rate, you can see that it is beginning to level off. That world of 10 billion that we were all preparing for several years ago is probably not going to come. If the population stabalizes, o…

It doesn't look like world population growth is slowing at all: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?end=2020&st... What reason do you have to believe that the population will top off at 10 billion?

That’s a legacy of increasing life expectancy not increasing number of births. ~139 Million people where born in 1988 and ~140 Million people where born in 2020.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-and-deaths-project...

~140 Million * global life expectancy of 72.6 years is ~10 Billion people.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#116

Post by dalbasal » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:09 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #113

dalbasal wrote: post #31

Extremely worthwhile question, long overdue. Productivity, especially in relevant areas like administration, stagnated despite computers hitting every desk. I read the Cowen book (Complacent Class) at the same time I was reader Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs." Heterodox writers from both sides of the spectrum. Same observation. On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administrati…

> On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administration not have become more efficient because of computers? Is the claim from those books that the administration of small colleges has not become more efficient because of computers? I would have guessed that there are far fewer employees (per student) doing clerical work at small colleges now than before office PCs were ub…

There are more employees (per student) doing administrative work at small colleges now than before office PCs were ubiquitous.

"Clerical* isn't really a term we use much now, and it's often associated with job descriptions from before the PC era. Stuff that happens in colleges, in office, that isn't academia, is generally known as administration. We have more of it, whatever you call it.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#117

Post by AnimalMuppet » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

Because GDP doesn't measure right. It measures dollars, not value.

Take Google search, for instance. I can look up (approximately) all the information in the world, for free. That shows up in the GDP as $0, because it's free.

But what is Google search actually worth? Would your business, say, actually pay for it as a tool? Probably, at least for those of us who need Stack Overflow answers. Real value is being produced, but it isn't being measured because it is being given away. (Yeah, I know, ads. Search itself is still being given away. So is Linux and gcc and...)

And does Google search help productivity? Yes. Does Linux? Yes. Does gcc? Yes. The ability to get all these things for free greatly expands the things you can do.

Software is producing value. But because so much is being given away, the value isn't showing up in the dollar-based metrics.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#118

Post by themacguffinman » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

nonameiguess wrote: post #56

jasode wrote: post #10

>Almost every recent A.I. advance has come from one tiny corner of the field, machine learning. Machine learning exposes a set of connected nodes, known as neural nets, to mass amounts of labeled real-world data in an attempt to give those nodes tacit knowledge. The breakthrough example was software that was able to identify cat pictures. >So far, these neural nets have given us some great demos but mostly niche real…

The author didn't really mean "real world" here. That is a misnomer. The article is about explaining why productivity gains have slowed even in the face of better software techniques. Machine learning has possibly made YouTube more addictive than it otherwise would have been, but this isn't increasing aggregate economic output for the world. It's just concentrating ad revenue in Google accounts, where it used to be s…

> but this isn't increasing aggregate economic output for the world

How is it not? Demand is increased as people want to consume more content, and supply has risen to match it. We have more creative & interesting content by more creators than ever, that's certainly a huge increase in overall economic output by any measure.

If you want to make some separate point about how "this isn't good for society" then make it, the economic productivity benefits of YT are huge regardless.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#119

Post by crazygringo » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #70

Perhaps because mainstream software of today doesn't add much to what we had in 199x. There already were the same Word, Excel and e-mail those days - . (and I doubt live chats we have today can add much to productivity, well-thought and well-organized emails are better). It can be possible to boost productivity with something like Roam Research (especially used in collaborative mode) but it would require a lot of enh…

I disagree completely. I'm insanely more productive as part of a team than I was in 199x.

Not even talking about things for software development specifically, but for general-purpose word-processing and spreadsheeting and scheduling, you've got:

- Live collaborative cloud editing over mobile. The back-and-forth that previously might take a week can now be done in half an hour while you're in the back of an Uber in a different country

- Googling how to accomplish spreadsheet tasks. Stuff that you'd just give up and not do before, or would take you days to figure out on your own, there are tons of blog posts and YouTube videos letting you get it done in half an hour

- Tons of scheduling and information-gathering improvements. Looking at people's Google Calendars live to find a meeting that everyone can attend, sending a Google Form to collect lunch preferences rather than contacting people individually, and so on

The productivity of modern administrative office tasks has skyrocketed with collaborative, mobile, cloud-based tools.

Getting stuff done as a team with static Word and Excel files that were stuck on a physical computer at a physical office while you tried to decipher printed software manuals was slow.

Re: Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

#120

Post by tshaddox » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #116

tshaddox wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the face of it, it doesn't make sense. How could, for example, a local college's administration not have become more efficient because of computers? Is the claim from those books that the administration of small colleges has not become more efficient because of computers? I would have guessed that there are far fewer employees (per student) doing clerical work at small colleges now than before office PCs were ub…

There are more employees (per student) doing administrative work at small colleges now than before office PCs were ubiquitous. "Clerical* isn't really a term we use much now, and it's often associated with job descriptions from before the PC era. Stuff that happens in colleges, in office, that isn't academia, is generally known as administration. We have more of it, whatever you call it.

"Administration" strikes me as too broad to make a reasonable comparison before and after PCs. I would expect that in the same time frame that office PCs came into existence, the roles of colleges has also expanded greatly, and if those new roles are considered as part of "administration" I don't think the comparison tells you much about the effects of computers. Are we counting things like counseling, career planning, financial aid, health (including mental health), immigration services, legal and compliance work, everything related to sports and athletics, etc.?