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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

#421

Post by fundad »

forrest2 wrote: post #276

Anecdote: I'm a midwesterner and half of my siblings, most of my wife's siblings, and some of my friends' siblings are in their late 20s, have no jobs (or From the outside, they look nervous / afraid to try to get into the job market or to date people. Men & women, but it leans men. The ones in poorer families stay home all day and play video games, and the richer ones venture out to spend their parent's money at res…

Not In The Labor force is a huge phenomenon and has been since before pandemic. I don’t think it’s just pockets I think there is a widespread cultural aversion to sacrifice now for yourself and your future kids.

If your local economy is in decline, you see more people demoralized and jobs dry up in a cycle.

I think I read the term “futureless generation” recently and that stuck with me.

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

#422

Post by api »

StillBored wrote: post #242
conductr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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,…

GUIs have really profoundly regressed. Go ready any UI design book from the 80s or 90s.

As you say the web is a culprit but so is attempting to shoehorn mobile designs into desktop.

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

#423

Post by spacemadness »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #405
dfxm12 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess it’s helpful to own all the media when you need to spread your propaganda around.

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

#424

Post by jldugger »

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…

Note that this is like, how every recession works -- we lay off people, and productivity spikes. The fact that we did the same thing during a government imposed recession shouldn't be surprising at all.

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

#425

Post by phone8675309 »

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…

The Washington Post is Bezos's mouthpiece - lower worker productivity hurts his bottom line so we have to suffer through his paper complaining about it.

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

#426

Post by mcguire »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #209
mcguire wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm doing is putting how you describe productivity into the form from the original comment. And I'll stand by that last version: How much money changes hands off of how much workers work? The input to labor productivity is how many hours are worked, correct? And no one is measuring output in terms of the number of bowls of soup produced by homeless shelters; those are converted to dollars based on a current inde…

Your fundamental confusion is that you keep equating economic activity with "money changing hands", which is wrong.

Ok, here's a question for you: back in ancient days, most women worked at home. Is taking care of your own children and your own household an economic activity as would count in GDP, for example? Is someone making a bowl of soup for their spouse different from someone making a bowl of soup at a homeless shelter?

"GDP measures the market value of the goods and services a nation produces. Unpaid work that people do for themselves and their families isn't traded in the marketplace, so there are no transactions to track. ... The lack of reliable data influenced the decision to leave household production out of GDP in the internationally accepted guidelines for national accounting." (https://www.bea.gov/help/faq/1297)

"Economic activity" that does not equate to "money changing hands" in some form, isn't an "economic activity" that counts for GDP or productivity, right?

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

#427

Post by eat »

whateveracct wrote: post #79
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.

My remote employers have - and continue to - effectively subsidized a lot of my personal ventures in the last decade. Personal projects (software and art), learning skills (programming, instruments, video editing), improving at video games and sports. Not to mention leisure. All done "on the clock." To be honest, maybe the majority of the 40hrs I get "paid" for is actually used for this instead of company output?

Just one guy's opinion, but to me it sounds like you're making intelligent, healthy, and entirely logical choices about your life and how you choose to spend your limited time.

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

#429

Post by mbesto »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #228
mbesto wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huh? if the records are "standard, digital and transferrable", it means all of the work associated with those records is sped up. - Need to retrieve past doctor visits about a patient? person at front desk no longer needs to walk to the folder closet, then scan the whole thing to find your name and then read through all of the documents to find the relevant visits. just click a button. - How about getting the prescri…

That will only be a speed-up if the time saved from easier information retrieval is smaller than the time spent in increased paperwork, which it may or may not be, but is an assertion that needs justification. In general, I'll note producing documentation is fairly slow and tedious. It takes something like an order of magnitude longer to write a sentence than to read it. So this optimization is only going to be a pro…

> easier information retrieval is smaller than the time spent in increased paperwork

What paperwork creation increased as a result of digital record use?

I'm beginning to think y'all are conflating the increase of documentation with the use of digitalization. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

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

#430

Post by dzhiurgis »

warbler73 wrote: post #247
nradov wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some healthcare provider organizations now employ medical scribes who follow physicians around and do all their EHR data entry. This is expensive, but can be cost effective because then the physicians have more time to perform billable procedures.

The least capable doctor's time is worth $300/hr. The scribe is paid what, $25/hr? This is so much like hearing of engineers that will not hire a $20/hr maid due to egalitarian reasons so they squat in filth or waste all their free hours cleaning, all while capable and willing cleaners starve. Insane.

Any competent engineer should at least have a maid, driver, nanny, servant, chef, gardener, pool cleaner, a mistress, dog walker and personal assistant /s
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