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Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

nytimes.com

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Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#71

Post by gumby »

ebiester wrote: post #42
gumby wrote: post #5

I was rather disappointed in Lohr (author of this piece) as he is smart and was around in the 1990s for Solow’s famous quip “We see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”. In the age of the desktop computer the iPhone would have been a flop (especially in the US’s then-backwards wireless environment). It takes time for people to understand a new capability and for it to reach the point whe…

Recently, with my husband's work, I saw three one-hour meetings turn into over 200 emails because someone doing the work refused to get on the phone and misunderstood the written word. I am skeptical that email is that much more productive for many people.

Although I've been using networked email as a primary communications channel for my entire computing life (since ~1978), I did work for a couple of large companies before it was widely adopted and you simply cannot imagine the amount of infrastructure required to produce and move physical paper documents around, not to mention disseminating mass communications. Moving that all online was a massive improvement, even with its drawbacks.

Now it's been ubiquitous for a while, people now try to deal with the drawbacks.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#72

Post by throw8383833jj »

confidantlake wrote: post #51
throw8383833jj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation: Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution 4T / 300…

Stole is pretty loaded language. Also where are you pulling the number 30 from? Seems arbitrary to me. 500 per year for every man women and child for 30 years is a lot of money. That would be equivalent to a one time payment of $60,000 dollars to every family of 4. Sounds like a lot of money to me.

30 is my estimation as to the number of years it takes for the average billionaire to achieve their wealth. most billionaires are pretty old, so I'd say 30 is conservative.

so, 2K per family/year in a country where the median houshold income is 60K, that's about 3.3% of their income.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#73

Post by morninglight »

LatteLazy wrote: post #43

Productivity is poorly defined and basically impossible to measure. So when discussing it forget any facts and just accept that you will have to talk about it like you do art...

If you regularly visited China over the last 30 years, you would have a clear and dramatic understanding of productivity.

.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#74

Post by lkrubner »

uejfiweun wrote: post #2

I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? What about 100 SDRs doing this at the same time, every day? How about trying to meet with someone on the other side of the country? Or having to hire hundreds of assembly lin…

“”””But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich””””

You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average.

Total wealth is created by productivity and is then divided between labor and capital. Where labor unions are strong, more of the total wealth goes to labor, and where labor unions are weak, more of the total wealth goes to capital.

It’s the total wealth per hour that has seen slow growth in recent decades.

If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.

In the old days, an army of secretaries kept the world in order. Despite your intuitions, they did in fact have ways of quickly finding one file out of millions of files. And secretaries offered a flexibility that we’ve lost with computers.

It is the loss of flexibility that causes computers to damage productivity.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#75

Post by drewcoo »

uejfiweun wrote: post #2

I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? What about 100 SDRs doing this at the same time, every day? How about trying to meet with someone on the other side of the country? Or having to hire hundreds of assembly lin…

Consider bullshit jobs. Yes, there's "work" being done, so it's "productive," but is it really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#76

Post by tshaddox »

gumby wrote: post #70
tshaddox wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Productivity" means "amount of input required to get a given output." I think you might be thinking of "productivity" as a synonym for "output". Okay but surely we're only talking about average productivity with some assumptions on the approximate employment rate and hours worked per week. No one is going to be impressed by a "5% increase in productivity" next year if unemployment rises to 99%, the 1% of remaining…

> Okay but surely we're only talking about average productivity with some assumptions on the approximate employment rate and hours worked per week. No. Productivity is simply output divided by some input factor. Employment rate, hours worked per week, wage: none are involved in that calculation (unless you're measuring productivity of the wage, i.e. COGS). > No one is going to be impressed by a "5% increase in produc…

> On the contrary, investors and managers will be very impressed by that.

No, they won't. You're free to propose any definitions of "productivity" you like, but this particular proposal doesn't remotely match what anyone will ever be talking about in discussions about productivity in the economy.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#77

Post by debdut »

confidantlake wrote: post #51
throw8383833jj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation: Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution 4T / 300…

Stole is pretty loaded language. Also where are you pulling the number 30 from? Seems arbitrary to me. 500 per year for every man women and child for 30 years is a lot of money. That would be equivalent to a one time payment of $60,000 dollars to every family of 4. Sounds like a lot of money to me.

If 60K is lot, how about giving each person 15K and stopping all taxes and redistribution from there on?

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#78

Post by debdut »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #67
Enginerrrd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have a different theorey. The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY. I find this hypothesis very intriguing. I too have found it troubling that the narrative against billionaires doesn't quite seem to line up with the envelope math. That said,…

as a starting point for figuring out the drop in wealth, I think we should calculate things in terms of number of man hours worked to achieve a given objective: shelter, food, water. Using dollars and CPI numbers is fraught with problems due to problems in their methodologies, which are quite numerous. The most important aspects of wealth are the basic needs of human beings: shelter, food, water and by extension tran…

wow! maybe you should write it up in a blog. awesome

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#79

Post by bsmith »

ebiester wrote: post #42
gumby wrote: post #5

I was rather disappointed in Lohr (author of this piece) as he is smart and was around in the 1990s for Solow’s famous quip “We see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”. In the age of the desktop computer the iPhone would have been a flop (especially in the US’s then-backwards wireless environment). It takes time for people to understand a new capability and for it to reach the point whe…

Recently, with my husband's work, I saw three one-hour meetings turn into over 200 emails because someone doing the work refused to get on the phone and misunderstood the written word. I am skeptical that email is that much more productive for many people.

Depends on the context. Just yesterday, I called the city parking, because I had made a payment the previous day, but I never received confirmation. After the separate ten minute queues just to be hung up on really frustrated me. I sent a short email to an email address I could find, and they fixed my issue within two hours of sending it.

Re: Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

#80

Post by LatteLazy »

morninglight wrote: post #73
LatteLazy wrote: post #43

Productivity is poorly defined and basically impossible to measure. So when discussing it forget any facts and just accept that you will have to talk about it like you do art...

If you regularly visited China over the last 30 years, you would have a clear and dramatic understanding of productivity. .

No, I'd be even more confused:

I'd look at huge building projects and millions of resulting apartments that were built but now had no buyers and were sat empty on some zombie bank's balance sheet. And I would not know whether they were worth sticker price (and China was very productive) or nothing (and China was very unproductive) or anywhere in between.

I'd look at FoxConn with >350000 workers making some of the worlds most popular and profitable consumer electronics, but then I'd see they only make 3.6% profit in a country with >3.7% risk free rate of return and think: they're wasting their time and would be better being liquidated.

It's almost as if big chunks of China are run to keep people busy and employed and meet arbitrary central targets and not to make things people want at a price they will pay...

Actually understanding what productive means, and how to measure it is really really hard. And at every step companies and governments have all sorts of perverse incentives to disguise it.

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