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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

#121

Post by tick_tock_tick »

cestith wrote: post #26
ep103 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During Covid, people were hiding in their homes, quarantined, with nothing to do but work. This year, companies expect workers to return to office, despite little change in conditions, except now we have to deal with all of the above issues you've just mentioned, AND the fact that employees have now proven they can work remotely perfectly well. It should neither be surprising that in a system where healthcare is tied…

All of what you've both said, plus the number of people who thought or still think COVID-19 is "no big deal" who now have a pulmonary deficiency and long-term mental fog.

I mean it's such a small percent do you really think it would show up in national data?

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

#122

Post by habnds »

qeternity wrote: post #92
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.

from FRED: "The efficiency at which labor hours are utilized in producing output of goods and services, measured as output per hour of labor."

The solow residual is technically total factor productivity but is generally accepted as labor productivity. it's just an accounting identity that is estimated along with GDP and other vaguely useful but not very accurate measurements like the unemployement numbers.

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

#123

Post by cm42 »

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…

"Just a billing platform with some patient stuff tacked on"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB_tSFJsjsw

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

#124

Post by mcguire »

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".

Weird story: From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, as-measured productivity significantly declined and then stayed at a lower level. This was during the initial few generations of technological impact on industry, including "just-in-time" inventory which kind of requires computerization. Yet, at this same time, "bosses and economists" were seen in public wondering if computers weren't a net negative on industrial production.

In addition to being weirdly defined, productivity is, as the graph demonstrates, very unstable over the short term.

If you want a longer version of the graph in the article, see "The 1990s Acceleration in Labor Productivity: Causes and Measurement" from 2006 (https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...), page 190 (10 of 22).

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

#125

Post by xab33 »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #27

I'm pretty sure I know why... The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc. In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games,…

I totally agree. Where I work, in-person work became optional. Strangely, everyone 35 or younger decided to work from home (most of them don't have kids, which would be the one decent excuse), but the older people mostly come in. At 34, I'm sort of in-between, but enjoyed bantering with people my age or younger.

So I get the worst of both worlds: my boss can still come in my office at any random time and bug me about whatever, but not the social life or the ability to bounce ideas off each other when designing a new system. All-online communication simply does not work for creative or complex tasks.

The youngsters get practically nothing done -- I worked with them for several years before the pandemic, so I know for a fact that their productivity specifically went down 90% -- and guess who gets to pick up the slack? It turns out that even relatively motivated PhD students actually need in-person accountability and direction, or they just spin their wheels at best, or goof off at worst. No matter what excuses they make, it's not good for them in the long run, since it will be reflected in their CV. I'm not against fun, even during work hours, but you have to get the job done.

It's a medical research institution with a small clinic, so there are, as you suggest, additional issues there. I think science, in particular, requires in-depth, in-person conversations and that is where most of the really good ideas come from.

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

#126

Post by mcguire »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #116
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then perhaps you'd like to enlighten us?

Workforce productivity at the national level is typically defined by some measure of output, the amount of goods or services produced (typically GDP), over some measure of input, the number of hours worked/workforce participation.

So, how much money is made off of how much workers work?

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

#127

Post by stormbrew »

dml2135 wrote: post #103
stormbrew wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, that's very interesting. Can you get more specific? What's the difference between productivity in this sense then, vs profit margin?

I'm abstracting a bit more than I should really, because yeah the way I put it comes off as too close to just profit.

But there are a bunch of ways to measure it, that generally comes down to some comparison of inputs vs outputs and those inputs and outputs have to be measurable in some way in aggregate.

If you Google for "economic productivity" or "labor productivity" you can find better explanations of the details than I'm likely to give.

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

#128

Post by dcolkitt »

The very important context is that productivity sharply rose in 2020, in the middle of the Covid recession. The recent drop in productivity is mostly just a return to pre-pandemic baseline.

The simplest explanation is probably just that the workers who were laid off during Covid were the least productive, and so average worker output went up, then fell as they re-entered the labor force. Or maybe even just there was some sort of abberation with how the complex statistic or productivity was calculated (e.g. inflation was actually here earlier than measured by CPI, and output was deflated incorrectly).

Either way, this is much more likely a pandemic related disruption and return to normalcy, rather than an indication that anything fundamental is "broken"

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

#129

Post by mcguire »

nine_zeros wrote: post #99
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…

But it increases GDP! Yay!
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