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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

#461

Post by JJMcJ »

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

Yes, this is "proof" that remote work is less productive.

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

#462

Post by bobthepanda »

mcguire wrote: post #433
moffkalast wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Efficiency argues for keeping those buffers as small as possible. In a series of "normal years", a business that keeps their inventory down to what they need in the "normal case" will be more efficient than one which keeps a larger inventory to handle more rare events. As a result, the former will out-compete the latter in the market. (Inventory, in this example, is just one "buffered" resource that needs to be manag…

Also, to some degree, in events like these what inventory is needed is not predictable, because humans are unpredictable and irrational at times.

Panic buying of paper towels early on in the pandemic, as an example, was not predictable.

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

#463

Post by dathinab »

A small anecdote:

During industrialization "extended" rests where added before they where required by labor protection because they increased productivity.

Multiple experiments have shown that in some situations software companies can be nearly as productive with a 32h week then a 40h week.

As far as I can tell the US has been moving in the opposite direction, dismantling or avoiding labor protection and sometimes outright forcing people to work multiple jobs.

Similar having long term health issues you can't treat because you can't afford it isn't grate for productivity. One of the more successful (non-private) health insurances in Germany is also one which also covers comparatively many precautionary health checks/things. As it turns out making it easier for people to less likely get serious sick is cheaper in the long run.

Add to this that a lot of IT systems where added but in my experience many of this IT systems are designed for middle/high level management to look nice, instead of being designed with and for the people which use them.

Lastly add to it that the future prospects look not so grate for a lot of citizens (not just limited to the US) which kills motivation (positive motivations works in general better long term then threads).

So I'm not surprised.

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

#465

Post by Cupertino95014 »

When you look at this graph, it just screams "noisy number."

In other words, "worker productivity" is a nonsense metric. It'd be more instructive to graph the variables that go into it, going deeper until you find something that makes some intuitive sense.

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

#466

Post by insane_dreamer »

"less productive" compared to when? Last year? Historically? Is this a return to the mean?

Just a brief glance at the first chart in the article, and last year was a bigger increase (6%) than this year's decrease (4%), and 2020 had the largest increase ever (10%).

I didn't even bother reading the rest of the article after seeing that.

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

#467

Post by gonzo41 »

ddoolin wrote: post #338
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,…

I agree with you. Although I don't think it's incompetence so much as laziness. Not just "too lazy to make a good UI" but "too lazy to find out what makes a UI good." I've seen so many coworkers happy to slap some basic form together and expect that to be good enough. I'm constantly writing UI for sports teams who do not at all like to waste time with these kind of fiddly UI elements and flows. Most of them would lik…

So what you're saying is HTML5 and server side rendering should be the go to before any client side junk.

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

#469

Post by worldsayshi »

api wrote: post #422
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,…

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.

I suppose one way to save the situation would be to build libraries that allowed you to easily build tuis/efficient guis that interact with open-api or graphql endpoints? If there only was a way to encode the workflow in addition to just the apis it could almost be generated.

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

#470

Post by WalterBright »

shadowgovt wrote: post #449
WalterBright wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here ya go (not a hypothetical example): https://slate.com/business/2022/10/san-francisco-toilet-mill... They beat out Seattle, that spent $250,000 on a portable toilet a few years ago. On my own street, the city water outfit installed a fire hydrant. It cost $10,000, including architectural drawings of the installation. When the crew came out to install the hydrant (the main water line runs under my property) I aske…

Anecdotes about corruption and mismanagement do not address the underlying point that government spending is not zero-sum. That hydrant was probably too expensive (maybe; insufficient data to say for sure). The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.

> Anecdotes

I gave real examples, not hypotheticals.

I never said government spending was zero-sum.

> That hydrant was probably too expensive

The bill was $10,000 for a $3,000 job.

> The damage if a fire breaks out and no municipal fire system is available in a modern city is catastrophic.

At $10,000 a pop there'll be a lot fewer hydrants installed, and hence greater risk of catastrophic fire.

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