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

#391

Post by krater23 » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

AnthonBerg wrote: post #363

baxtr wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would not wonder if you throw so much research time to a normal flu you will find similar things.

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

#392

Post by nemo44x » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

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…

Similar things happened during the Great Depression. Many things made in that era before the war are highly sought after since the craftsmen who had jobs at the time were often among the best in their field.

Musical instruments from the 30’s are legendary.

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

#393

Post by yurishimo » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #346

conductr wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is in 30s but has had a lot of women's health stuff going on the last decade. We stay completely within the same "healthcare network" of hospitals precisely because they actually use the same system and all doctors can access it (obviously we like the providers as well!) But even for basic procedures we could save a little on like lab work or imaging by going out of this network we've learned it doesn't reall…

Yes. All the systems are set up this way. The problem is: how do you allow departments to retain their fiefdoms in a world of centralised data? The answer is to spend a fortune on management consulting.

Or nationalize the documentation infrastructure. This is not a problem in the developed world. i give my doctor my tax ID and they can see my entire patient history, all of my medication, and relevant notes from other providers.

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

#394

Post by theGnuMe » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #77

FearlessNebula wrote: post #14

It’s the phones. Our attention spans and ability to focus have been destroyed by constant little hits of dopamine.

"hits of dopamine" is not really how it works. Drugs like methamphetamine or cocaine directly give you "hits" of dopamine. Perceiving a stimuli through your senses does not directly manipulate the dopaminergic neuronal populations. It's just like any other stimuli where, if the stimulus is actually intrinsically rewarding, eventually the dopaminergic populations in your brain begin to associate the stimuli with poten…

Umm, you might want to read up on dopamine and how it works. The Huberman lab podcast has a great episode.

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

#395

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

This could easily be an accounting anomaly. Productivity is defined as real GDP / hours worked. If you shrink the denominator - say, by causing 25% unemployment with lockdowns - while also boosting the numerator with government spending, you get high productivity, which we had during the pandemic. If you then shrink the numerator (say, with high inflation, which translates a given nominal GDP to a smaller real GDP) while increasing the denominator (through record low unemployment), productivity will drop.

IMHO traditional economic metrics are not well adjusted to an economy where output is largely independent of effort or hours worked, particularly not when measured on a quarterly basis. I work for a (remarkably slow and bloated) tech company. If I choose to do nothing other than post on Hacker News, that will not become apparent in company performance for ~2 years, because that's the median time for a project to make it out to market and start having an effect on consumer behavior. The company could lay me off and it wouldn't affect the bottom line at all, but it'd boost productivity. Conversely, if I hire a new person, I don't see significant gains in output for ~2 years, but employment and hours worked has gone up, and so productivity is down.

The limiting case for this is algorithmic cryptocurrency trading with mark-to-market accounting (of which there was plenty in 2021). Here, you have computers trading virtual assets back and forth at ever increasing prices. Because prices are going up, the value of everyone's assets increases, and with mark-to-market accounting you'd show a profit. And yet nobody is employed and no real work is being done. Productivity is effectively infinite, but it means nothing.

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

#396

Post by lupire » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

ep103 wrote: post #12

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…

During Covid, people were hiding in their homes, quarantined, with nothing to do but work. This year, companies expect workers to return to office, despite little change in conditions, except now we have to deal with all of the above issues you've just mentioned, AND the fact that employees have now proven they can work remotely perfectly well. It should neither be surprising that in a system where healthcare is tied…

HN aside, most people don't have jobs that you can do more of at home than at the office / factory / lab / school. Heck, with school it's quite obvious that "teaching hours delivered" sustained during pandemic, but "education learned" dropped by probably half.

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

#397

Post by dfxm12 » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:37 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…

It's just the corporation friendly mass media trying to combat calls for better worker treatment/compensation. This is just the next single from the album that brought us "quiet quitting", "the great resignation", "millennials are lazy", etc. It's important for the backers of these media outlets to float these stories out there, lest anyone become sympathetic to workers in light of the facts that minimum wage hasn't kept up with either inflation or productivity, that corporations are engaging in profit inflation, that the fed is intentionally raising rates to wrest back some power from workers, and so on.

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

#398

Post by moffkalast » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

mochomocha wrote: post #367

moffkalast wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Yeah that's the problem, those estimates are usually arounds zero it seems. I mean sure on paper it checks out to be most profitable and most of the time it also works in real life. But you end up with this rube goldberg supply chain machine that can't be stopped or you apparently end up with a cyclic dependency problem and you cannot restart your production.

We build structures to take a one in a ten thousand year flood or earthquake, but it's too much to expect corporations to keep more than 2 weeks of stock? Sure.

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

#399

Post by twotwotwo » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

So, the economic value measured for a piece of code drops if fewer people buy the product that it's in or its price has to be cut, entirely separate from how fast anyone is coding. Similar logic applies to a lot of sectors, not just software. Macroeconomic changes are going to work their way back to these stats eventually, independent of any changes in how workers spend their day or the concrete stuff they produce. (Kind of like stormbrew and nostrademons said!)

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

#400

Post by bumby » Mon, Oct 31, 2022, 9:40 PM UTC

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…

This is a really good point about how we myopically understand the value stream of a process. Often, steps that we feel are bureaucratic waste provide a lot of value to someone else in the process.

With that said, I think most healthcare is correct to take a "patient centric" approach. What the OP seems to be making is a "doctor centric" take and, if one was to be overly cynical (I'm not), your post may skew to the side of a "researcher centric" or "societal centric" approach. Doctors should do what's best for their patient, not necessarily what's best for society, or themselves, or a lawyer, or a research lab. It's easy if you work in one of those tangential areas to take your eye off the ball.