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U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
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Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#72Lots of people are productive WFH, but loads are taking it easy. Often in my team Fridays people barely dial in, maybe are connected a few hours max. Thursday afternoons now are dead as people get ready for the weekend... Job market is still strong so no one really cares that much as we know we're difficult to replace.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right about daycare/school closings. Even now, essentially post-covid, if our two-year-old gets COVID, that's a 10-day quarantine from daycare. That's 10 days where one of the parents has to work from home and be horribly unproductive because they are watching a child at the same time. And you can get COVID repeatedly. It often from the daycare itself, but also from a sibling who is in school. Even with full,…
Not only that, but sometimes even the threat of an outbreak can hamper the availability of childcare. Last winter, a few staff members were exposed to a close contact, so they held them out of work as a precaution - but that resulted in one of the rooms having to close for a week.
I assume the parents and staff at my daycare just have a collective unspoken agreement to not test for covid.
The remaining Covid policies are stupidly inconsistent anyway.
RSV is far more dangerous to children, but that is allowed to go unchecked. Hell, you have to pay $250+ just to get tested for it. Rhinovirus/influenza/norovirus/rotavirus/other coronaviruses are all OK, with kids leaking from both nostrils in the classroom.
But one kid or adult gets Covid and things have to close? Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#74These things always really need a giant flashing neon note that "productivity" doesn't mean how much workers get done but how much money is made off of what workers get done. They're only loosely connected, and most productivity gains have come from workers having to "do less" to "make more".
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#75Perhaps people are at the point of revolt over the ever widening productivity vs pay gap? https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980 Time for the workers to reap some of that benefit.
> Productivity kept on climbing and wages stagnated post ~1980
The growth of government sopped up the difference. Nothing the government does comes for free, and then there's all the additional costs of complying with regulations and doing all the paperwork.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's supply and demand - the supply of workers has doubled the last decades while demand has remained roughly the same. I think it's a miracle that salaries are so high currently.
This is actually contrary to Econ theory and empirical data. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486 The trend is towards less immigration and thus lower demand for goods/services and lower supply of labor.
I think he is mainly talking about woman entering the workforce since 1970ish, which massively increased the labor pool.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#77It’s the phones. Our attention spans and ability to focus have been destroyed by constant little hits of dopamine.
"hits of dopamine" is not really how it works. Drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine directly give you "hits" of dopamine. Perceiving a stimuli through your senses does not directly manipulate the dopaminergic neuronal populations. It's just like any other stimuli where, if the stimulus is actually intrinsically rewarding, eventually the dopaminergic populations in your brain begin to associate the stimuli with potential for reward. This leads to an increased perception of the salience of that particular set of stimuli.
This is very different from cocaine which can cause humans to perceive stimuli as more important and potentially more rewarding even without any rewarding component to the stimuli at all.
Using a computer is not a drug. Stimuli on a screen are no different from stimuli from looking at something else. Using a smart phone does not give you "hits" of dopamine. Stop conflating normal environmental stimuli with drugs that act directly in the brain. It is dangerous because the way governments deal with drugs, and the very real addictions possible, is violence. Bringing violence into this non-violent non-coercive context is immoral.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#78ITT: A bunch of people convinced they know why, with 1-2 anecdotal datapoints, mostly their own experience.
Come on people, be at least somewhat scientific.
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#79Lots of people are productive WFH, but loads are taking it easy. Often in my team Fridays people barely dial in, maybe are connected a few hours max. Thursday afternoons now are dead as people get ready for the weekend... Job market is still strong so no one really cares that much as we know we're difficult to replace.
My remote employers have - and continue to - effectively subsidized a lot of my personal ventures in the last decade.
Personal projects (software and art), learning skills (programming, instruments, video editing), improving at video games and sports. Not to mention leisure. All done "on the clock." To be honest, maybe the majority of the 40hrs I get "paid" for is actually used for this instead of company output?
Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why
#80Does anyone know how productivity for knowledge workers is actually measured? The article only goes so far as to mention that measuring productivity is "particularly tricky", but what datapoints exactly are these statistics even pulling from?