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U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

washingtonpost.com

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Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#91

Post by lambdaba »

WalterBright wrote: post #75
kennend3 wrote: post #4

Perhaps 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.

Does that go hand in hand with the growth in administrative work? I would think so.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#92

Post by qeternity »

stormbrew wrote: post #74

These 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".

This is not how productivity is defined or measured.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#94

Post by stormbrew »

dml2135 wrote: post #80

Does 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?

The economic concept of productivity has nothing to do with anything you can measure about a single employee (or kind of employee), the article is just conflating two very different meanings of the same word.

In aggregate you measure it based on how much the company spends vs how much it makes off sold product. It's a measure of the efficiency of the company to its holders of capital.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#95

Post by RomanPushkin »

My guess it's a game against inflation. People understand they're getting paid less for their hard work, and not motivated enough to work harder every day. For comparison, I'm spending x1.5 more on groceries than 1 year ago. Some items even x2 more expensive, comparing to last year.

Salaries aren't growing that fast.

Personally, I love what do, and this fact didn't affect the ability to work. However, I can imagine some people can get seriously affected by that.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#96

Post by Retric »

lkrubner wrote: post #88

I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software. But did the doctors become more productive? By almost any measure, they became less productive. People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problem…

That documentation time is largely driven by the insurance industry which was really painful before these systems. It’s almost shocking how much more productive doctors are inside the VA.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#97

Post by _jvqe »

Its simple. The healthy people moved away.

Its obvious that much of the GDP is based on low aptitude/low skilled products and services (i call it fat juice and fat juice filtering, looking at buffetts investing advice). An unhealthy environment is not something to grow old with.

In the states, we can see that the illegal migration dumping is caused by the unskilled labor needed to support archaic GDP numbers.

As a technology native, I was too young to work when the H1-B economy started to spring up, but the linear from that is easy to see.

And somewhat off-topic, it looks like with the UK's PM, we get to see more of the effects that infosys played on the economy.

Businesses that outsourced gave away their whole business model is an easy conclusion, so now they all have lower quality/priced competition (obviously speculation, but plausible remains entertaining).

Looking at Walmart, I could never understand why they left their workforce in servitude, without paving the way for a future. The irony that "merica'" is filled with products from a communist country still astounds. They have no prospects for the future and supplement incomes with foodstamps and welfare.

Even quiet quitting is easy to decipher. Its an unhealthy environment.

Its simple. The healthy people moved away.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#98

Post by lkrubner »

bdw5204 wrote: post #11

I think there's a very obvious reason for the "productivity drop": Return to Office I remember tons of studies showing that remote work had caused unprecedented increases in productivity so it seems plausible to me that companies ending it caused the productivity drop which caused the minor recession earlier this year (the big one due to the Fed's rate hikes is, I believe, still in the future). The article itself eve…

The BLS recently reported that at its peak, only 7% of Americans were working from home, so this demographic is probably too small to have much large scale impact on the productivity numbers. If there is stagnation in the productivity numbers, we should look at what the other 93% of workers are doing.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#99

Post by nine_zeros »

stormbrew wrote: post #74

These 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".

> "productivity" doesn't mean how much workers get done but how much money is made off of what workers get done

This is so true. The amount of bureaucracy has actually increased. This makes every worker work more. But this bureaucracy is unproductive work, thus does not lead to a rise in income (for the company).

E.g. my healthcare provider uses fax machines (yes that FAX) to communicate with insurance providers. Fax is asynchronous and without confirmation/tracking of work done. Often, the fax is sent but the other side simply files it in a random place or forgets to process the work. So, I (the patient) now needs to follow up for weeks with insurance and healthcare provider to check on the status of that FAX.

This is unproductive work and yet, it is taking a toll on every individual involved in this process.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#100

Post by [deleted] »

whateveracct wrote: post #79
rr808 wrote: post #72

Lots 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?

[deleted]
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