U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by pixl97 » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

duderific wrote: post #173

toomuchtodo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

With the McDs i've went into recently it appears everything still runs even if there are zero cashiers being that you can click your order in a big touchscreen.

Turns out that cooks seem more important that cashiers. Course we'll see see how much of that can be replaced by robots in the next few decades.

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

#362

Post by jjk166 » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

US Worker productivity is 0.7 standard deviations below its average over the last 3 years. It is 3.6% below all time high. It is higher now than at any point before July of 2020. YOY Productivity growth has dipped negative and then went back to positive 20 times in the past 22 years.

To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity

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

#363

Post by AnthonBerg » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:16 PM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #270

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.

The difficult part of it is: for some people it is literally nothing. We had it now for the fourth time since 2020 even though we’re properly vaccinated and careful as much as life permits. It’s a bit worse than a cold but much better for than the flu. So, yes, for us life just goes on with COVID. No need to change anything.

There are many, many scientists who are attempting to warn us that isn’t nothing. The literature is piling up.

Paper: Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection – https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-01113-x

Paper: “Excess risk for acute myocardial infarction mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic” — https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.28187

Paper: “p53/NF-kB Balance in SARS-CoV-2 Infection: From OMICs, Genomics and Pharmacogenomics Insights to Tailored Therapeutic Perspectives (COVIDomics)” — https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.871583

SARS-CoV-2 directly and indirectly interferes with p53 expression and balance.

On p53: “p53, cellular tumor antigen p53 (UniProt name); p53 proteins are crucial in vertebrates, where they prevent cancer formation. As such, p53 has been described as "the guardian of the genome" because of its role in conserving stability by preventing genome mutation. Hence TP53 is classified as a tumor suppressor gene.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53

The literature goes on and on and on. People really are not okay after contracting this virus. I know plenty of people who simply are not recovering after COVID illness. Friends. Close family. Kids.

We are being warned.

And crucially: We can clean this crap out of the air. Nobody has to breathe in SARS-CoV-2. We absolutely must demand that something is done. There’s lots and lots that can be done.

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

#364

Post by paulpauper » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:16 PM UTC

The supplied chart looks like noise. Maybe the supposed loss of productivity is cyclical. It does not seem too concerning, imho.

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

#365

Post by Scoundreller » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

dan_quixote wrote: post #322

Scoundreller wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It’s less the software, and more the users, site-specif…

> Another study found US clinicians write 4x longer notes I wasn't aware of this, but as the spouse of a medical provider I know that most US providers are burdened with an ever-present worry about malpractice.

To clarify, the length was 4x longer. Some of the discrepancy is attributed to more keystrokes, but a lot of it is copying/auto-inserting stuff.

These automated analyses don’t capture whether the extra content is beneficial or not (it might be!).

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

#366

Post by topspin » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

jjk166 wrote: post #362

US Worker productivity is 0.7 standard deviations below its average over the last 3 years. It is 3.6% below all time high. It is higher now than at any point before July of 2020. YOY Productivity growth has dipped negative and then went back to positive 20 times in the past 22 years. To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish. https://t…

Always read the comments first.

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

#367

Post by mochomocha » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #359

mcguire wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird story: From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, as-measured productivity significantly declined and then stayed at a lower level. This was during the initial few generations of technological impact on industry, including "just-in-time" inventory which kind of requires computerization. Yet, at this same time, "bosses and economists" were seen in public wondering if computers weren't a net negative on industrial prod…

> "just-in-time" inventory That really was a net negative eventually. Covid managed to completely wreck the worldwide supply chains because of that idiotic approach. God forbid anyone keep any buffer in case anything happens.

It's definitely not an idiotic approach, and companies do keep buffers. In the most advanced cases, probabilistic models are devised to estimate how big these buffers should be. Asking for companies to keep buffers for unpredictable "once in a century"-type events is unrealistic.

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

#368

Post by SoftTalker » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #328

Mordisquitos wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Classic business process mistake of trying to change a verbal contract into a form-letter. "I'd like a quarter pounder with cheese and fries" is utterly unacceptable for buying a house or taking out a car loan, but it's the ideal way to order lunch. The people marketing, designing, and writing the application software have never worked in the business, of course, lack of experience has never made people like that pau…

Exactly why I cannot stand using the kiosks to order food at a fast-food restaurant. They take what used to be a five-second process to verbally state an order, and turn it into a multi-minute agony of taps, reading, canceling suggested upsells, etc. before finally getting to completion.

I guess the restaurant saves having to pay a person at the counter to take the orders, at the expense of massive customer frustration to the point where I hardly ever go to these places anymore. And then they wonder why their year-over-year sales are declining.

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

#369

Post by zeroonetwothree » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

postalrat wrote: post #272

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…

Did you even bother to click on the article before typing your opinion of what happened? Their chart shows we are far below any sort of pre-pandemic baseline.

The chart only shows change, not the actual value. If you look at a chart of the values you'll see that it's true we've just returned to ~2019 values: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity

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

#370

Post by maerF0x0 » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

my 2c is nihilism and cynicism are why.

Why bother, nothing means anything anyways? Why bother chasing the dream, if it doesn't come true?

People have increasingly been losing meaning and purpose in their lives. Old dreams like home ownership, family (including extended), close knit friendships, and eventual financial freedom/security have been supplanted by travel (broken by inflation & lockdowns, made fake by social media), fur babies (due to gender disparagement and estrangement), workplace politics / friends for a season (as we move for work, and have increasingly tighter requirements for friend groups due to technology (ie you can find people who agree with you online, so no need to befriend the neighbor with slightly annoying political beliefs), and life time of debt and little investment value[1].

So people are simply burned out being asked to pursue a long run strategy w/ a "promised" dream. The people delivered on their end of the bargain, but the dream makers didnt.

[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat... From late 1999 to 2016 returns on .inx after inflation have been down or flat. People no longer believe the "Buy the index and you will see profits" after 20 years of contrary evidence. Over the past 30 yrs the index using the "8% per year" usual claim, should have returned 10x but it actually only returned 1/2 that.

Why try, it's not going to work anyways?