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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

#141

Post by BobbyJo »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #134
mcguire wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, not at all: for example, you can be a non-profit and still contribute to GDP, since you're still creating economic activity. Heck, even what the government does contributes to GDP, and that's not making money for anyone.

I think this is exactly what parent meant. "How much is made" doesn't strictly mean "profit" in terms of a for-profit institution. The net output of a non-profit is directed somewhere, either internal or external to the entity, and that can loosely be considered "making money", or at least in the sense I believe parent meant.

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

#142

Post by mcguire »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #134
mcguire wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, not at all: for example, you can be a non-profit and still contribute to GDP, since you're still creating economic activity. Heck, even what the government does contributes to GDP, and that's not making money for anyone.

So, how much money changes hands off of how much workers work?

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

#143

Post by spookthesunset »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #73
sylens wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce.

Could you imagine if there was some test that showed you all the viruses that are circulating in your system at any given moment? If we applied the same rules as we do for covid to such a test, people would literally never be able to leave their house...

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

#144

Post by Mordisquitos »

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…

> People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problems and they keep underestimating the flexibility of the old models.

Related to this, but in a completely different context, I have had similar thoughts lately when eating out at restaurants in Spain. It's incredibly frustrating from a customer's point of view when the waiter taking your group's order has to use a newfangled tablet or phone-like device and tap through each individual order, often depending on the peculiarities of the app's UI and how the designers expect the process to carry out: “Are you all having the set menu? No? OK, first I need to know how many of you are having it?" [taps count on screen] "Right, now I need the starters but ONLY for the set menu orders..." etcetera—you get the idea. Then, while going through this unnecessarily slow process, God forbid someone who ordered from the set menu wants to change their main while the waiter is already taking the à la carte orders.

Meanwhile, in restaurants that haven't unnecessarily techified the procesz, the waiter can take the order in the way that's most practical given the circumstances and that best fits his way of taking notes. Ah, but then how does the order reach the kitchen without the tech? I have no idea, all I can say is that it worked fine before these things were put in place, and the manual system is by far the quickest and most flexible from a customer's point of view.

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

#145

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

Our past productivity also came with some of the longest working hours per year of any nation, iirc. Our pay never got improved and our living conditions worsened, we work too long, and we're sick of killing ourselves for corporations to become insanely rich. Of course we're not productive, we're sick of the bullshit.

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

#148

Post by kps »

Retric wrote: post #96
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.

> It’s almost shocking how much more productive doctors are inside the VA.

Cerner has a contract to fix that.

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

#149

Post by qqqwerty »

I feel like supply chain issues are worth a mention here. The labor market has been super hot, and finding new employees is a chore. At the same time a number of sectors outputs have been rate limited by supply chain issues. Do you reduce shift work and lay off salaried staff while you wait for the supply chain to catch up, or do you use a combination of stimulus money, cheap debt, equity sales, etc... to bide your time until things are back to normal?

In the last year or two, at the peak of the employment boom, the answer was almost certainly to bide your time. If and when the supply chain returned to normal, you would then be in a good position to restore output to meet demand. If you had laid off a bunch of folks, you would have found yourself scrambling to rehire in one of the worst employment markets (for employers) in history.

However, with interest rates rising and a potential recession in the near term horizon, that equation might change. We could (and already) seeing more layoffs. I think after a year or two, we are going to start seeing productivity snap back as a result.

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

#150

Post by spookthesunset »

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,…

Exact same boat dude. I miss the before-fore times a lot and still cannot believe how we got to this position.

Still trying to figure out whats next for me. This WFH shit is gonna stick around in our industry for a while... and it just isn't compatible with how I function. I have no clue what to do next.

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