Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why isn’t new technology making us more productive?

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 603 posts

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

#91

Post by makeitdouble »

lkrubner wrote: post #74
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 th…

> Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.

To note, in the olden days, mistakes written in your record or misinterpretations (e.g.took the wrong record from the cabinet) would just have been a fact of life and nobody might even notice. Ms Wilson and Ms Wiston just shouldn't have been in the same hospital at the same time.

As you say everything was more flexible, more fuzzy. If you wanted the world to look orderly you'd quickly sweap under the rug the misaligned bits or disappear what you don't want there.

This is also why you use cash and paper register if you need your restaurant's finances to look pristine on paper while still racking in money that doesn't need to be accounted.

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

#92

Post by wincy »

titzer wrote: post #85
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…

It'd be a lot more effective to redistribute that wealth, first, not over 30 years, and second, not to 100% of the population, but to the bottom income brackets, so the smallest quintile or even decile. So a one-time payout to the bottom 10% would be $150,000. For 20% or 30% of the population, that kind of money could absolutely and instantly lift them out of poverty. Moreover, you needn't take every last cent from t…

Seems immoral to give it to the bottom 10% of people in the US, who are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the world. Why not give $15,000 each to the 300 million poorest people in the world, or $5000 to the 1 billion poorest?

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

#93

Post by mikewarot »

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…

>Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer?

Yes, things are much faster now. But having to manually scan an entire office of files sequentially was never a thing.

The files were alphabetized, indexed, collated. Clerks knew what they were doing.

In digging through my home state of Indiana's Marriage records, they had an ingenious system that did a fair bit of error correction and sped up retrieval of information by orders of magnitude. This system goes back to the 1800s, consists of an index, and sequentially recorded Marriage Licenses, bound in the same book. Entries were indexed by both the groom and brides last name, which meant in most cases, you could recover from a single error. Worst case, you had to scan that one book for the County, for that year, or fraction thereof. If you knew the date, that made it much faster as well.

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

#94

Post by mikewarot »

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…

Richard Nixon had a plan for dealing with this, but changed his mind at the last second. [1]

1 - https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-presid...

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

#95

Post by mbrameld »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #35
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…

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…

> it's not true. it's debunked now

Where has it been debunked?

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

#96

Post by otikik »

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…

I partially agree with this:

> I think the biggest drops in wealth have occurred in shelter, medical and a little bit in transportation.

But my conclusion is very different: shelter, healthcare and transport have not evaporated. If anything, we are more capable of treating people than before. We have the internet now, we should be able to educate more people.

The problem is that the cost of those things has increased significantly in the last 80 years, but salaries have stagnated. A diabetic teacher could buy a house and afford insulin on a single salary, now they barely can afford the later while they live with their parents, because they can't even rent.

As to why things are more expensive now... well I think the answer is that the difference is going to a small group of extremely rich individuals. Insurance and hospital owners in the case of healthcare, University owners on education. And lawyers in all layers.

The cost of transportation is a bit more complex. It is a finite world, yes. But we'll run of nice weather to plant crops before we run out of oil.

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

#97

Post by sudden_dystopia »

We are more productive. We are doing more with less people. It doesn’t seem like we are more productive because most people are overworked which creates an illusion of unproductivity. Most of those jobs that were lost in 2008-2009 were never replaced, everyone left just had to pick up the slack which tech helped facilitate

The other aspect is that a lot of our tech is vapid entertainment. As buzz aldrin said, “They promised me mars colonies. All we got was Facebook” or something along those lines.

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

#98

Post by kylecordes »

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…

Where did all the productivity benefits go?

The answer is probably: to competition. If one company got CRM, wow, huge productivity boost! They would sell so much more per unit of salesperson labor input.

But it's a competitive world, so a lot of companies get CRM. The additional sales productivity gets competed back out; perhaps with the recipients of sales efforts (who now have a large increase in the amount of incoming contacts) losing/wasting as much productivity in aggregate as the companies using the software have gained.

The same dynamic applies to many other areas. Not to all areas of course; there are also real massive, long term benefits to productivity. Famously it used to take over half of all human effort just to keep us fed. It doesn’t anymore.

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

#99

Post by ipnon »

The right side of the bell curve can now program an application worth many dollars per month and zero marginal reproduction costs. The left side of the bell curve is incapable of extending these technologies but increasingly consumes them due to their low cost. This can explain the seemingly paradoxical phenomena of the rich becoming fabulously richer, wage growth stagnating on average, and productivity barely improving. The inventions of the last 50 years were of smart people for smart people. We wanted flying cars on Mars, we ended up exchanging Amazon warehouse jobs for free TikTok.

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

#100

Post by gowld »

thewarrior wrote: post #41
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…

Because software cannot produce resources just because it exists. Productivity refers to being able to actually manufacture more widgets and things like food, roads. Yes technology has made things cheaper. By moving things across the globe and creating a complex supply chain that can produce more goods for less energy and raw material input. But the per Capita availability of energy and minerals is a fundamental bott…

Services are also productivity.
Post reply on HN