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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

#301

Post by AussieWog93 »

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…

>This doesn't even account for the incredible decline in civility from customers if you work a customer-facing job.

Not sure if you're in a customer facing job, but I've personally noticed that there seem to be noticeably fewer Karens now compared to pre-pandemic levels. (There was a spike during the first lockdown, but that died down within a few months.)

Everyone seems to be used to random disruptions now, and I think all of the campaigns about retail worker abuse have really made customers stop and think.

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

#302

Post by coinbasetwwa »

logicalmonster wrote: post #140

The reason for anything large and complicated is very nuanced and probably has a lot of small causes that we might all disagree on, but I'd say that the overarching reason for this social malaise might be that a lot of people are feeling a lack of hope for their future. If you think you're working towards something good: a family, home ownership, kids, a reasonable amount of life enjoyment in terms of leisure, a stab…

You’re 100% right. That plus the fact that my employer tried to fire me for not taking an injection, I’m good on chilling.

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

#303

Post by StillBored »

conductr wrote: post #273
StillBored wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, this is because the people writting GUI's these days are mostly incompetent, or hamstrung by "web" technologies. Early GUI's didn't have the problem you describe because they were designed as discovery mechanisms to the underlying function. AKA, the idea was that after clicking File->Save a dozen times you would remember the keyboard accelerators displayed on the right hand side of the menu. Or if nothing else,…

It's also because it's enterprise software. Which actually isn't software, it's more of a platform. You have to do so much implementation detail that the GUI is just the result of some form-builder type module. Everything I've ever encountered that was enterprise software, felt like it's GUI was not made by humans at all. I don't actually know how they get built but they're almost never optimized for humans or the us…

I've not done that kind of SW in a long time, and never with someone else's platform. But that said, the reporting application I was describing above was a platform in the same sense. It was largely an engine for generating the forms being filled out by the end users. Which is why it there was so much effort doing usability stuff, because the underlying form descriptions had to have tons of optimization flags for doing things like list sorting common items to the top N items of drop-downs, or moving fields around in the form to match the ways the users thought about filling out the forms.

So there were two sides, the engine optimizations to assure things like tab orders on a form, and the was the actually writing the form descriptions. In the first couple organizations that adopted it I wrote the forms and the engine in parallel adding feature flags/controls as needed to support the desired UI outcomes. Later after I quit, the lady who wrote much of the RFP responses started writing the actual form descriptions because it was just as easy as drawing them out in the (visio?) plugin she was using with MS word and doing screen captures for the RFP. Then I guess because she knew how to do it, was doing the "tuning" as well.

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

#304

Post by astrange »

mcguire wrote: post #129
nine_zeros wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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!

It doesn't increase GDP if they get less productive.

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

#305

Post by NegativeLatency »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #95

My guess it's a game against inflation. People understand they're getting paid less for their hard work, and not motivated enough to work harder every day. For comparison, I'm spending x1.5 more on groceries than 1 year ago. Some items even x2 more expensive, comparing to last year. Salaries aren't growing that fast. Personally, I love what do, and this fact didn't affect the ability to work. However, I can imagine s…

While Groceries have been impacted by inflation, the big chains in the US have also been just raising prices as indicated by their increased profits recently: https://www.wcpo.com/money/local-business-news/kroger-profit...

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

#307

Post by svnt »

fintechjock wrote: post #236
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.

I’m not sure if this is your point, or just that it’s population level, but there is certain to be lag in the measure. I.e. if I contribute $10B to GDP in Q3, and lay off 10% of the workforce, my productivity looks great, but a large portion of that contribution will stem from work done by a larger workforce in Q2, Q1, and before, perhaps well before.

So the measurement during periods of recession or expansion will always be artificially elevated or suppressed.

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

#308

Post by jasmer »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #152
mcguire wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Yeah I don't think this is true. GDP is an economic measurement, not some kind of intrinsic thing.

So you can make a beautiful thing for your home - not GDP. Make it and give it to someone - not GDP either.

Pretty sure money has to change hands, or in the case of government, we measure it as $ spent.

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

#309

Post by VLM »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #269
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'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. I don't think "by almost any measure" is right. I think…

Medical decisions are based primarily on financial profit, and patient outcome data is not required to determine which medicines are most profitable.

The point of extensive documentation is shielding from the worst of malpractice lawsuits. The legal system is still of the legacy opinion that doctors have a responsibility to their patients as opposed to the more modern understanding of responsibility toward pharma company bottom lines, and all patients legally deserve the 100% successful participation trophy, so a documented decision with only 95% chance of success means insurance payouts about 5% of the time, unless its carefully documented it was all the patients fault or at least the MD could not have known the outcome in advance.

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

#310

Post by Gibbon1 »

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…

> I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software.

Thing to remember finance/economists/rentiers have a different definition of efficiency and productivity than you do. In this case the productivity has to do with billing not the uninteresting things that doctors do. By reducing the cost of billing and forcing doctors to document more things to be billed more money can be extracted.

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