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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?

#351

Post by pixl97 »

throw__away7391 wrote: post #312
unchocked wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 95 4Runner restored to like new condition would be an excellent ride today, Gad mileage notwithstanding. Run out vs. new is a straw man w/r/t/ old tech vs new.

I haven't owned a car in well over a decade, but new cars in the 80s and 90s were just trash compared to the 2000s, and aside from the absence of manual transmissions and some models putting too many features behind touch-screens they only seem to have gotten better.

I'd say around early 90s things started changing for the better in US cars... before then they were complete trash.

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

#352

Post by biren34 »

asah wrote: post #250
Barrin92 wrote: post #122

Because new technology is as Thiel often quips limited to the world of bits rather than the world of atoms. Paul Krugman once asked, if you go into an average house right now and you take out all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s? Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth gives a similar example, what if you went into a time capsule between say 1890 and 1950 compared to 1960 and 2010? In one…

bogus! I was there, and let me tell you, I get so much more done each day, it's shocking: - cellphones, the internet and GPS saves insane amounts of time coordinating RL events. I'm never gonna get back the 1000+ hours I spent with paper maps trying to find places, playing "phone tag" coordinating activities, etc. Kids these days, they just have no idea. - remote work & learning = 2+ hours PER DAY. I used to pay $500…

I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit of your comment.

I'd add, though, that the entire complex of metrics we use to define "productivity" were invented to quantify and guide the improvement of things that were a problem 100 years ago

Of course the second 50 years were worse than the first 50 years, because if the people working during the first 50 years accomplished anything, then all the easy wins were taken.

And the problems being solved changed. If your entire population has moved on from the problem of producing enough to meet material needs, then of course the work being done now will score poorly. You need to update your metrics as fast as your technology changes, and we just haven't done that.

Everything you've described above is a real added value, but it's not the kind of value that the old metrics were designed to measure.

Classic case of grading fish by their ability to climb trees.

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

#353

Post by marcosdumay »

DANK_YACHT wrote: post #311
marcosdumay wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hum, ok, you expect an exponential growth in productivity. Any reason why? Anyway, talk about an underspecified issue. The article simply has no claim at all of how they expect productivity to behave, just that it's not following the expectation. The one productivity problem I'm aware about is about it not growing at all for decades, just moving on a noisy horizontal. It's relevant that the GDP per capita follows a d…

I don’t have an expectation. The article is essentially asking why is the second derivative of productivity negative despite increased technological advancement. I’m just pointing out that your graph shows that the second derivative of productivity is indeed negative.

Well, it's walking around zero, since the trend is a line. The rate of change is neither decreasing nor increasing in linear terms.

But, anyway, that's GDP per capita. Data for productivity is much less available, but here is some for the US alone (that's the change annualized):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=PRS85006092,

Notice that the rate of change itself (first derivative) stays for ages around 0.

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

#354

Post by onecommentman »

kylecordes wrote: post #101
throw8383833jj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest drop in wealth is Shelter and Medical. 50 years ago land was much cheaper. A 300K house (non-land cost) costs 310K (maybe 10k for the land). Whereas today, in states where much job creation happens (i won't name names), a 300K house costs 600K or more. You could say, the previous land owner made all that money and it's true. But, it's just a one time wealth transfer from the latest generation to previous…

The challenge with shelter is that it is fundamentally a positional good. Everyone wants to be within the x% most convenient, which is say, desirable, places to live. So as there are more and more people with more money to chase those limited "slots", they get more expensive. Making everyone worse off. The solution is to massively build many more new good places to live; but there are also enormous forces against tha…

When I read “Everyone” in your post, bells went off on my head. It’s too broad a statement. You could offer me a 2M home in the Bay Area, and I’d auction it off to charity. A 5M condo in Manhattan and I’d do the same. You can only say there are enough people with enough money and determination to bid up property in certain areas. Two very wealthy people bidding on one property can take it to astronomical levels, but they are not “everyone”. There are more people who want to live in the Bay Area than there is affordable housing. The number of people who want to live in the Bay Area, though, is a fairly small percentage of the US population (ignoring the homeless who seem to love the Pacific Coast).

Most places in the US are already “good” places to live, if you come with the right attitude, e.g. immigrants looking for a better life. After WWII, GIs dispersed themselves all over the country. They had seen (sometimes too much of) the world, and were open to, and happy with, anyplace in the US that gave them a job, a house and an ability to raise a family. They knew how bad it could be and counted on being able to improve wherever they moved to in the US. And they mostly did, thanks to a solid economy, a stable political system and pure moxie. Same with non-wealthy foreign immigrants. Making the most of what you have generally leads to a pretty nice life anywhere in the US. Even Canada :-).

Internal mobility in the US has been on the decline in recent years, perhaps a sort of generational timidity combined with familial inertia has led to certain highly-populated areas experiencing irrationally high housing costs.

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

#355

Post by pixl97 »

jart wrote: post #341
lotsofpulp wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What utility does the solid lumber provide over the lightweight softwoods? What utility does the copper provide over plastic? For lightweight softwood, I can at least think of the utility that it will be cheaper. And for plastic over copper plumbing, same thing, it will cost less, but it will also be more resistant to corrosion and easier to repair.

It serves the utility of not being able to hear people breathe on the other side of the home. Speaking as someone who grew up in old New England colonial houses, I'd say that if anyone wants to understand why Californians build so many tech products without privacy, one needn't look any further than the lack of privacy to which they grew accustomed in their homes.

That has exactly zero to do with the lumber. Nothing at all. In fact heavy dense lumber would transmit sound better than a light wood.

I have a new house built from this 'crap' wood you distain, and you can't hear people in the next room because it has sound deadening materials in the walls.

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

#356

Post by root_axis »

kareemsabri wrote: post #135
angarg12 wrote: post #123

One thing I don't see mentioned often is that productivity in software development has skyrocketed, but it's hard to appreciate. Today's services are much more sophisticated and complex than just a decade ago. Even if some of that complexity is incidental and undesirable, it's undeniable that today a small team can pump out a much more refined app that entire companies did back then. This isn't only guess work, here…

I'm genuinely curious about this, and would like to see some data. When I started coding professionally the LAMP stack was the go-to, and your program would generally just do all the "work" in the context of a web request and then render an HTML page in response. Now, the systems are much more complex for sure (queues and asynchronous processing, event buses, microservices, multiple databases for different purposes)…

> Of course I could be dealing with a bias because as a novice programmer I worked on simpler programs and now I work on more complex / powerful programs.

The software techniques you've listed are among the reasons why it's even possible to build more complex and powerful programs. Forward progress in software is always resisted by the contemporary programmers of the day who are deeply fond of their chosen anachronism and don't like it when they perceive the feeling that it is threatened by a newcomer. This is an ancient law of software that few seem to accept, but c is to assembly as python is to c and javascript is to python. Software developers tend to be thoughtful people, these tools exist for a reason.

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

#357

Post by nanomonkey »

metadat wrote: post #259
nanomonkey wrote: post #252

Speak for yourself. I feel like I have riches of new tech at my disposal. Currently have 10 gbs fiber internet for $45/month, in one second I can download the contents of my first hard drive. My laptop has 64gb of ram and 8tb of ssd. I don't even know what to do with that much compute as I mostly use Emacs and Firefox for everything. Meetings are completely online, so I no longer need to travel to visit other offices…

If you have the means, it's nice. Where is this mythical $45/mo. 10gbps fiber connect?

Sonic in Oakland, CA.

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

#358

Post by pixl97 »

colechristensen wrote: post #182
dockd wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about money? In 1960, you either had to have cash or find a place that took a check to make purchases. Maybe some places took a credit card. Ever have to wait in line behind someone that is writing a check? "Productive" won't come to mind. To get that cash you had to walk into a bank during banking hours. Then we got ATMs and could get our money any time of day. No more cutting out of work to deposit that royalty…

Honestly the change is pretty small. Up until at least the mid 90s everywhere took checks. Honestly today interacting with the cash register at CVS takes longer than writing a check. Sure, a 30 second check writing reduced to a 10 second tap to pay can be a little bit of an improvement (except when it doesn't work), but really it's not that much better.

May you be the luckiest person on earth if the people in front of you only took 30 seconds.

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

#359

Post by Spivak »

dendriti wrote: post #326
marginalia_nu wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but how many things are actually central to document processing?

Literally 100% of the documents I process are sent to other people. So collaboration and sending documents are core functionality.

It’s even stronger than you suggest, the actual “word processing” bits turned out to be a vestige of a paper world and “collaborative text editing” was actually the killer feature.

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

#360

Post by onecommentman »

diego_moita wrote: post #257
Barrin92 wrote: post #122

Because new technology is as Thiel often quips limited to the world of bits rather than the world of atoms. Paul Krugman once asked, if you go into an average house right now and you take out all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s? Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth gives a similar example, what if you went into a time capsule between say 1890 and 1950 compared to 1960 and 2010? In one…

> Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth A fantastic book! But give it up. You tried but you can't explain that argument in a few paragraphs in a social network. That's a level of intelligence that is simply not possible here. Just look at the answers you got. You (and Gordon) talk about changes in the fundamental, in the daily routines of everyday life, in the organization of life, cities and markets. Howeve…

Not just “so much better now!” but “incredibly super fantastically better than anything ever was or could have ever been compared to the horrible disgusting very bad, no good cretinous crud that came before!!!”. They shout so loud I can’t hear what they are saying. They sound silly.

Would be nice if the discussion focused on one particular point in the past, say 25 years in the past, 1997. What has dramatically improved since 1997 as a result of technological advances? It’s a much harder case to make, e.g. the first Prius was released in Japan in 1997, Windows 98 was in beta, Netflix was started…

https://www.computerhope.com/history/1997.htm

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