Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 751 posts

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

#211

Post by ravenstine »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #82

The lowering of standards, shortages, expensive fuel, food inflation are all reminiscent of Communism. People don't feel like working for a system when it seems to be failing them. A million dollars for a new home, when the lower bracket still makes under 50k, and get raises in cents. Just kind of kills incentive to work hard, when even if you do starve and penny pinch your way into some savings, inflation will eat i…

There's a strong motive to deny that people operate on incentive. If people are incentivized by profit and attaining greater things, the idea that wealth distribution doesn't disincentivize workers completely collapses.

Numerically, I make substantially more than I did 5 years ago. In terms of relative value, while I do have a fancier title, I barely make more than I did when my job was easier. If someone were to ask me "what are you career goals", I'd struggle to tell them any at this point because I have little reason to do more than what I already do. What, I'm supposed to want to take on more responsibilities only to find the economy adjust itself so my lifestyle barely changes? I know some people have a frankly ridiculous form of workaholism that allows them to persevere, but I see them as the horse from Animal Farm. Eventually they will lose the energy to do what they do effectively and the system is not going to support them in proportion for their loyalty, to say the least.

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

#212

Post by WalterBright »

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.

For the people who don't like my post, where does all the money come from that funds the government? Nothing is free.

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

#213

Post by boole1854 »

mcguire wrote: post #198
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is a good faith question, you can answer it by reference to any good economics text; or even, you know, Wikipedia. But it feels like maybe it's not. Here's another example: you volunteer at a homeless shelter, where you serve food on a soup kitchen line. You have contributed to the GDP of the United States. By all means, feel free to fit this into your preferred framework.

What I'm doing is putting how you describe productivity into the form from the original comment. And I'll stand by that last version: How much money changes hands off of how much workers work? The input to labor productivity is how many hours are worked, correct? And no one is measuring output in terms of the number of bowls of soup produced by homeless shelters; those are converted to dollars based on a current inde…

> And no one is measuring output in terms of the number of bowls of soup produced by homeless shelters; those are converted to dollars based on a current index price.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does have multiple teams dedicated to documenting how price is related to quantity of output. They don't literally count bowls of soup at every homeless shelter, but they do document millions of price vs quantity measurements on a regular basis. This data is then used in the calculation of productivity.

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

#214

Post by mbesto »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #207
mbesto wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Which translates into productivity. If something is standard, digital and transferable it means you can increase the rate of output in relation to its input (which is the definition of productivity).

Right, but it's the records that are standard, digital and transferrable; not the work. So what you end up optimizing for is producing paperwork.

huh? if the records are "standard, digital and transferrable", it means all of the work associated with those records is sped up.

- Need to retrieve past doctor visits about a patient? person at front desk no longer needs to walk to the folder closet, then scan the whole thing to find your name and then read through all of the documents to find the relevant visits. just click a button.

- How about getting the prescriptions provided to you from a previous doctor? Reduction in time to phone / fax the previous doctor. just click a button.

- Want to check if your insurance covers your procedure? Receptionist calls the carrier, sits on a 6.5 minute customer service wait queue, then gets the info versus 1-click.

- and, and...

It was always about productivity.

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

#215

Post by nebula8804 »

_jvqe wrote: post #97

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 te…

Maybe i'm too stupid to decipher your message entirely but the healthy people moved away? To where?

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

#216

Post by Scoundreller »

Tsarbomb wrote: post #200
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…

Having once worked in the EMR/EHR space, a big thing to consider is some companies come in with their own workflows, processes, and ideas that they want to push onto physicians while other companies are way more accommodating in building "bespoke" solutions to specific problems. The latter in my experience ends up providing better results to physicians as they have been employed as domain experts in building the soft…

> other companies are way more accommodating in building "bespoke" solutions to specific problems.

Then you upgrade and everything breaks!

But it’s an age old battle for and against standardization. I just walk around with several charging cables because each is “the best” for charging a small li-ion battery.

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

#217

Post by chasd00 »

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…

hours worked went way down but dollars made stayed the same because of the handouts. The productivity metric had nowhere to go but up.
Post reply on HN