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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

#401

Post by cableshaft »

throwaway5959 wrote: post #218

We’re fucking exhausted and there’s never an end to work (agile). That’s probably part of it.

I like Agile in theory but you're totally right about there always being something else, no proper breaks, you fix or make several things and then two weeks from now you're doing the same thing again but a different feature or fix, pretty much no change in the pace of the routine, just go go go.

At least when I worked in fast food, sure there'd be the nightly dinner rush, but that only lasted about two hours, then everything would quiet down and you'd get to take a breather, take your time, goof off with coworkers, put a movie in the VCR in the breakroom (it was a long time ago), etc.

Usually I at least take it a little easy the day we finish a sprint, but I still have to 'report what I did yesterday' in the sprint meeting the day after, so I have to have done enough to have some progress to report the next day. And then it's off to the races again. It's fucking exhausting.

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

#403

Post by d_sem »

The article focuses on the drop of productivity measured in 2022. Personally 2022 was the first out of 2 years I could take a meaningful vacation. Perhaps the reduction of restrictions allowed people to improve their work-life balance in favor of more "life".

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

#404

Post by mcguire »

gridspy wrote: post #350
astrange wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Many things increase GDP without being good. For instance Oil spills increase GDP as suddenly a bunch more (cleanup) work is being done and paid for.

There's an old joke about an "economic hero" being a wealthy man going through an ugly divorce while dying of cancer.

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

#405

Post by ryanwaggoner »

dfxm12 wrote: post #397
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…

Also the cries for returning to the office

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

#406

Post by d_sem »

The article focuses on a productivity drop observed in 2022 as compared with the past two decades. Anecdotally, this is the first year I've been able to take a meaningful vacation since the pandemic started. Perhaps, the reduction of covid restrictions allowed individuals to improve their work-life balance in favor of more "life".

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

#407

Post by throwaway894345 »

justinpombrio wrote: post #330
throwaway894345 wrote: post #269

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. I don't think "by almost any measure" is right. I think…

> notably healthcare researchers use this data to improve patient care, develop new medicines, and to precisely identify which medicines are likely to help on a particular patient (and which medicines may even harm them!) The majority of the notes being written by doctors now is boilerplate. A lot of it is copy-pasted. It's written because of insurance companies (which have incentive to deny claims), because of liabi…

> But you could probably reduce the paperwork that doctors do these days by a factor of 4 and not loose anything of value.

Maybe, but this sounds like some vague hunch based on ???. I very highly doubt the healthcare industry would tolerate doctors wasting ~37.5% of their time (75% of paperwork time is wasteful * 50% of doctors' time spent on paperwork = minimum 37.5% of doctors time wasted). Doctors are expensive, so recouping anywhere near 40% of their time would be a priority.

It seems more likely that the paperwork is actually pretty useful (but the utility is not obvious to the lay observer), or at least useful enough that the wasted time isn't significant to the healthcare industry (which is already struggling with margins and personnel).

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

#408

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

My guess is it's related to inflation. Changing costs can cause people and companies to adjust to different economic conditions, and that adjustment can hurt productivity.

Something similar happened in the mid-seventies.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

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

#409

Post by ryanwaggoner »

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.

That there are downsides is not in dispute, but you’ve not shown that it’s a net negative. Perhaps it is, perhaps the shortages we experienced because of a very unusual event like COVID outweigh all the day to day advantages of having little slack in the system. But you haven’t shown that.
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