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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

#231

Post by covidiot5 »

conductr wrote: post #110
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…

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#232

Post by sebastianconcpt »

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…

Brilliant observation.

In a way, all might be a huge early optimization.

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

#236

Post by fintechjock »

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…

Maybe an even simpler explanation is that productively is roughly calculated as GDP / employed workers.

Productivity almost always goes up in a recession, especially one accompanied with massive layoffs (like early COVID).

Productivity is going down right now compared to 2020 because we are pretty much at full employment.

These productivity measurements aren’t really tracking individual productivity at all.

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

#237

Post by boole1854 »

mcguire wrote: post #203
boole1854 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's a measure of a weighted average quantity of output of goods and services (not of money) compared with the quantity of labor input.

"Quantity of output goods" is measured in dollars, as mediated by the current price, no?

Not in general, no. They do count the dollars, but they also measure the dollar-to-quantity ratios of various goods and services. The final productivity measure is based on these adjustments.

So if the amount of money that is exchanging hands goes up but the amount of goods and services produced stays the same, then the measured productivity does not go up.

You may be thinking about how GDP is calculated, specifically regarding government employees. For this category of spending, the "quantity" measured for the dollars-to-quantity ratio is simply the number of government employees. So as long as the government is hiring more people, the money they spend on those people counts towards real GDP, regardless of what those people are doing.

However, government spending is not used in calculating productivity, which measures only certain parts of the private sector where it is possible to also measure output of goods and services instead of relying on measures like 'employee counting'.

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

#238

Post by VBprogrammer »

conductr wrote: post #110
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…

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…

At Uni as a summer job I worked processing Corporate Actions for a large custodial bank. We used exactly the same kind of system where every action was 4 characters. I can still remember some of them despite it being 10 years since I did that job. Even more importantly, the screens were trivially scriptable so lots of the grunt work could be handled by writing export scripts, pulling a bunch of data into excel, processing it and occasionally posting the results back the same way.

Absolutely no way a modern system could be half as efficient, short of completely automating the whole job (which involved a lot of communication with other parties and basically freeform restrictions).

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

#239

Post by Kon-Peki »

raydiatian wrote: post #233

> no one knows why $7.25

My local Aldi is advertising $16.50/hr + benefits. Average rent for a 1BR in the general area is $1000-1200ish.

As for me personally, I don't think I could be more productive if I tried. I finish work and then look to pick something up - are there isn't anything ready. If I try to make something ready, people want everything run past a committee to gain consensus. Twice in the past 6 months, I've spent 2 weeks developing a plan, running things past people, and then I come to a single question and the response is "hmm, you know, let's not work on this right now".

This morning I was on an email chain in which one executive had committed us to paying $$$$ for some consultants to do something, and he wanted the CTO to do some checks to make sure our system could handle it. But what exactly? The CTO had no idea what he was asking for. They went back and forth, and I'm nearly positive that they were both acting in good faith, but for the life of them they couldn't communicate. And so a bunch of workers are going to sit around with nothing to do, collecting their paycheck.

I've been doing this now for over 20 years, I'm fairly senior, and I deal with executive-level people a lot. I've never seen anything like what's going on, and it's totally unfair to blame this entirely on workers (they aren't blameless either, tbh).

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

#240

Post by Cyberdog »

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…

If this were to happen, then wouldn't people just start "checking out" on Thursdays?
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