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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

#171

Post by aeternum »

dcolkitt wrote: post #128

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…

I'd argue it was also due to lack of alternative options for leisure time. When everyone was stuck at home there's only so much Netflix the avg person can watch. People likely spent some extra time on work because it was something to do.

Now with everything reopened there are many more options.

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

#172

Post by coldpie »

yamtaddle wrote: post #117
coldpie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But is it just me? No. I go into the office every day because I feel the same. I need to get out of the house and see people. (It is OK if you, reader, do not feel this way! People are different!) There's a handful of other folks who come in every day. I'm starting up a project this week to revive our office culture a bit, to try to spring back from the COVID devastation.

I think a lot of us work-from-home preferrers also like (good) offices better than WFH, just not to the tune of hundreds of dollars and tens of hours lost per month.

Bus pass here costs $90/mo and I get to spend ~80 minutes per day reading books. My office is across the street from the library, it's pretty great :) It's no accident my house is next to a bus line, that was a major factor when we were buying.

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

#173

Post by duderific »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #119
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.

Excellent, this provides productive evidence for a 4 day work week if everything still runs with folks checked out on Fridays and they’re not in the office performing work theater. https://www.4dayweek.com/ Labor power in the face of a recession comes from dwindling labor supply. 360k boomers retire each month in the US. 1.8 million people over the age of 55 die every year. Not enough folks to backfill. https://archi…

"Everything still runs" could be applied in a lot of situations, but it's not necessarily a desirable state.

Everything still runs at McDonalds if there are half as many cashiers, but it will take a lot longer to get your Big Mac.

Everything still runs at the hospital if there are half as many nurses, but the level of care is much worse.

You get the idea.

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

#174

Post by Eleison23 »

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…

The last good, independent physician I had was a fellow who played Chess on the weekends downtown. His practice moved about 5 times while I was a patient and he finally was snapped up by the VA.

He habitually called me "friend" and was very frank about my insurance not paying for stuff I was asking about, which I appreciated. He also once profusely apologized to me for placing a computer in between us. He said the new requirements of his practice made it so he had to pay more attention to the computer than to me, and we were both sad about that.

The doctors I got after that make no such apologies.

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

#175

Post by grumple »

This headline is alarmist and the article itself is designed to manipulate people unfamiliar with the productivity metric or its recent movement. Note that the article and the graph are about the % change in productivity... which spiked sharply during the pandemic and has now returned to the growth line it was on prior.

Here's the fed numbers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

The productivity drop the OP is referring to is that little blip downwards at the end. Hell, here's the Fed asking a year ago if the pandemic boosted productivity: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/07/has-the-pandemic-boo...

Basically all the chatter in these comments are irrational speculation, based on a false premise, and flatly wrong.

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

#176

Post by nradov »

D13Fd wrote: post #59
sylens wrote: post #6

Perhaps people have had to expend more energy just keeping their personal life together in the last few years. People with children have had to deal with the constant school closings, childcare facility closings, etc. and that has taken its toll. They may have family members who got Covid or had treatment for other ailments delayed by the pandemic's rush to treat Covid patients. They could've experienced a huge shift…

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,…

This is exactly why many people intentionally avoid testing themselves or their children. If you don't have a positive test then officially you don't have COVID-19 and can continue your normal life (symptoms permitting). (I'm not claiming that this is a good practice necessarily but it's what most parents do.)

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

#177

Post by hezralig »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #121
cestith wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What is such a small percent and where are you getting your data?

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

#178

Post by BobbyJo »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #153
BobbyJo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GDP is denominated in dollars, so this seems to be a somewhat vacuous position - yes, that's how we measure economic activity, but it doesn't have to involve money changing hands. Productivity is based on the value of the work done , not any profitability assessment. The original post which set off this chain asserted it was about not how much workers get done but how much money is made off of what workers get done .…

> The original post which set off this chain asserted it was about not how much workers get done but how much money is made off of what workers get done... which is unambiguously wrong

I don't believe the difference is consequential here, since the originating point still holds even using your definition. I wouldn't say it's "wrong" so much as imprecise, as the way I interpreted the statement would encompass your more detailed description.

It's like when I ask people "how much money" they make, I intend them to include non-cash compensation in the number (in dollar equivalent), and pretty much all do without additional prompting.

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

#179

Post by n65463f23_4 »

D13Fd wrote: post #59
sylens wrote: post #6

Perhaps people have had to expend more energy just keeping their personal life together in the last few years. People with children have had to deal with the constant school closings, childcare facility closings, etc. and that has taken its toll. They may have family members who got Covid or had treatment for other ailments delayed by the pandemic's rush to treat Covid patients. They could've experienced a huge shift…

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,…

sounds like washington state lol. one of the reasons we moved from there.

now at my kids preschool, if a kid gets sick they stay home, if they are better the next day they come back. no PCR tests, no missing 2 weeks if any member of the family was sick, its great

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

#180

Post by ameister14 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #133
conductr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Doctors fought it as long as they could because they knew what it meant for them. I remember pretty early demos in early/mid 2000s when I was doing some clinical grunt work in college. I had written some software to make my department’s life easier so I was offered up as the hospital’s…

They also fought it because they didn't go to medical school and survive residency to fill out forms all damn day—and they didn't used to have to, they had staff for that. Then the computerized systems "replaced" that staff but all that really means is they cut the human time needed low enough that full-time workers weren't needed, but didn't eliminate it, so now that's another thing doctors have to do themselves. AF…

That and the staff actually doubled over the same period
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