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The Great Productivity Puzzle

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Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#101

Post by cableshaft »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #54
guelo wrote: post #8

Yes, things like Google Search must be increasing productivity. But at the same time the amount of time dedicated to infotech entertainment addiction is going through the roof. I wonder how much productivity the hours of Facebooking at work is costing us.

Forgetting for a while the non-linear costs of distraction in cognitively intensive jobs, I wonder if Facebooking at work is really costing us anything at all? I'm having a hard time imagining that office workers of 20+ years ago were that more job-focused than they're now. But then again, the problem may be Internet in general - I can't imagine people being able to do so many non-work errands while in the office if…

I did data entry in an office with no internet connectivity (well it did, but they didn't allow browser usage, we connected to mainframes to do our work) before about 12 or 13 years ago.

When people wanted to zone out they read books, usually. Audiobooks were also common. I brought the entire series of Discworld novels in on pdf, and managed to read the entire series while I worked there. I also wrote a bunch of notes down on paper.

Hell, when I was working in warehouses away from computers entirely I'd still zone out during it and mentally work out some ideas for personal projects once I was done with work. Sometimes I actually miss that, since I seemed to have a lot more ideas then.

Point being, you don't need computers or internet for people to find ways not to be 100% productivity machines.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#102

Post by imtringued »

nostromo wrote: post #7

I hear classic economic thinking is that productivity gains lead to higher wages. But could the causation be reversed? Cheap labor tends to disincentivize innovations that can lead to productivity gains. Perhaps we're entering a period where there are simply too many people for too few jobs. This keeps unemployment high, wages flat, and removes the incentive for companies to invest in automation.

Just like the cheap oil results in people not paying attention to how much their car consumes.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#103

Post by Inthenameofmine »

Spooky23 wrote: post #51
Animats wrote: post #14

Something that's puzzled me for a while: why haven't we hit "peak office" yet? Why are there still so many people working in offices? By now, we should have many abandoned office blocks, much as we have abandoned factories in the Rust Belt. But that's not happening. We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of c…

A: It's more productive, and easier to supervise employees. 75% of knowledge worker telecommuters that I've run across who aren't doing tracked tasks are doing very little. We do have a lot of empty office blocks, especially in midsized cities. Even in NYC, there are plenty of mid rise buildings that are minimally occupied, as automation ate up the armies of clerks who once inhabited them.

That's a good point. But how do you track non-task work which is mostly creative work, be that in the office or remotely?

In my experience as both and employee and employer, you can't. Even in the office it's not like you can tell people "come up with good solutions". It all turns into make believe work.

As an employer we simply don't hire people anymore who need that type of supervision. As a result our possible talent pool expanded from our city to the entire world.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#104

Post by botterworkshop »

redwood wrote: post #99
wodenokoto wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but aren't the US experiencing very high inflation?

No.

Seems to me certain goods, such as food and living costs have been inflating rather rapidly, but others such as technology and services have not. I have also seen certain geographic markets more affected by this than others. Mind sharing your reasoning behind a flat no?

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#105

Post by sixbrx »

Jtsummers wrote: post #36
Animats wrote: post #14

Something that's puzzled me for a while: why haven't we hit "peak office" yet? Why are there still so many people working in offices? By now, we should have many abandoned office blocks, much as we have abandoned factories in the Rust Belt. But that's not happening. We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of c…

> We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. I can't speak to the general case, but to my experience with big corporations/enterprises. Automation is rarely implemented, and when it is it's half-assed. And then a year or two later they try again, but the old system remains, and now your workers have to connect two systems manually. And then a year or two later... Not my domain, I'm busy enoug…

> there are a ton of people whose job is, at its core, to manually synchronize about six databases

There was an insightful article that I can't find for the life of me that claimed this sort of thing was the future of much human work - doing drudge work on the margins between automated systems, that's not worth the cost of automating.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#106

Post by FabHK »

gumby wrote: post #74

What frustrates me about articles like this (even professional ones -- this simplifies for a general audience) is that they only look at one side of the equation. Low inflation is the opposite side, and it's interesting. Yes, GDP$ per unit hour has not gone up much, but the flip side is that the economic value of the output has gone down . If you look in terms of PPP, workers are doing better: fewer labor hours go in…

You can examine the whole issue of productivity growth and wage growth in real terms (that is, taking inflation out of the picture by deflating using some inflation measure, either a GDP deflator or consumer price index or so) instead of in nominal terms.

While the article doesn't explicitly mention it, I'd assume that they're looking at productivity in real, not nominal figures, precisely to disentangle the effects of inflation.

Meaningful comparison across countries requires purchase power parity (PPP) exchange rates, rather than market exchange rates. However, this article doesn't really talk about other countries at all, so I don't understand why you bring up PPP here. If fewer hours of labour are required to buy dinner, that's just real wages, nothing to do with PPP...

And how does lower labour force participation enter? (If we assume that less productive workers drop out first, that should increase productivity, btw - which we don't see...)

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#107

Post by drjesusphd »

dredmorbius wrote: post #34

This is yet another review of Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth . Incidentally, William Nordhaus also just published one.[1] Of the good: Gordon's book is a tour-de-force of the past 150 years (nearly) of economic progress in the US, and documents impacts on everyday life meticulously and engagingly. I and numerous reviewers, several of whom I strongly suspected to disagree, find the case he makes…

> Is energy a fundamentally different economic input? What is the relationship of energy to economic growth?

I am particularly interested in this. My intuition tells me that energy is special because it is the only thing that the laws of physics says cannot be recycled. And that, given enough energy, everything else can be.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#108

Post by internaut »

Spooky23 wrote: post #64
thedevil wrote: post #2

A few rants (mixed in with a few half-baked ideas): 1) Economic progress from the industrial revolution is about quantity. We learned to make a lot more stuff. The industrial revolution is not quite done, but the impact is less and less every decade. We may never match that quantity growth of stuff because we don't even want more stuff, we only want better stuff. And we're getting better stuff and more variety. 2) In…

You're wrong about one thing... The low skill jobs didn't vanish. They moved to places where wages and regulation (safety, environmental, etc) are less. The people who made Fisher Price toys in East Aurora, NY were made redundant by equally low/moderate skill workers in Mexico and later China. Your undershirt was made in North Carolina until the late 80s, and shifted to a variety of places until it hit the bottom --…

I haven't paid above 12 euros for a good quality pair of everyday use shoes for many years. Buy your shoes from army surplus. They are comfortable and I think they are mandated to last 5k miles. This would be the runners they use for physical exercises.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#109

Post by Spooky23 »

ThomPete wrote: post #77
Spooky23 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wrong about one thing... The low skill jobs didn't vanish. They moved to places where wages and regulation (safety, environmental, etc) are less. The people who made Fisher Price toys in East Aurora, NY were made redundant by equally low/moderate skill workers in Mexico and later China. Your undershirt was made in North Carolina until the late 80s, and shifted to a variety of places until it hit the bottom --…

Outsourcing is the last step before automation. You have to follow your own rationale here trough. What happens when mexicans become richer and also concerned about safety at workplace because now they can afford to worry about it? This is why even china is outsourcing to even cheaper places, robotics or why when production sometimes comes back it's in fully automated factories.

> What happens when mexicans become richer and also concerned about safety at workplace because now they can afford to worry about it?

They get canned and the work gets shipped out to China.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#110

Post by FiatLuxDave »

tunesmith wrote: post #3

What sorts of constraints in our daily lives feel blindingly obvious, in terms of wishing for a solution? I mean beyond true life-transition concerns like finding new housing or new jobs. In the past, I'm sure a clothes-washing machine must have felt pretty obvious even if people weren't sure what it was. It's always been a pain to do laundry and there had to have been a wish for some sort of contraption to make it d…

Think bigger.

I truly feel that we won't be considered truly civilized as a species until some child has to ask their mother, "Mommy, what was pooping?". The child would then slowly grow more and more horrified as their mother explains what people had to do in their daily lives in the past. "Mommy, that's disgusting! How did people live like that?"

We still have a very long way to go.

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