Where has all the productivity gone? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#101

Post by sbelskie » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #38

The whole falling productivity meme is more of a myth and or overstated. It doesn't mean anything. Look how well the stock market has done over the past decade. No one losing sleep over a .1% reduction in total factor productivity or whatever. What matters more is if technology is advancing, are living standards rising,is the economy growing. The answer seems to be yes for all of those.

The economy is growing slower as are living standards(at least in the US post 1973 or so) because productivity growth has been slower. Both are obviously advancing, but more slowly.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#102

Post by coldtea » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:45 PM UTC

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #99

coldtea wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a huge assumption here that productivity isn't increasing, which is false. Actually the assumption in the post is the exact opposite: that productivity has increased. The question it poses then is "so what do we have to show for it?".

Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause th…

>Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work.

So, not much then.

For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades.

Likewise, cheap clothes mean diminishing quality (regardless of price bracket, from $5 items to $200 brand-name ones, they are all most often than not made in sweatshops in the developing world, often with the same materials and processes). Plus tons of clothes thrown, which is an environmental attrocity.

(As for cheap music and movies, that's a byproduct of one basic delevopment: high speed internet, which enabled a new delivery method. Not the best example of an increase in productivity, not to mention those are passtimes).

As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century, so 100+ years ago, and it was due to running water, bathrooms, hand washing, and a few such things. Low hanging fruit. Certainly not due to the last 70+ years of "increased productivity".

Meanwhile we pay more for healthcare, housing, and education (the 3 things that matter more), wages have stagnated since the 70s, and work-life balance has gotten infinitely worse, depression ever more prevalent, the middle and working classes have collapsed, and so on. No savings and no chance of retirement at any reasonable age for the majority as well.

>I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off.

Probably it's from people who are not impressed by more and cheaper trinkets.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#103

Post by babesh » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

robjan wrote: post #2

There is a huge assumption here that productivity isn't increasing, which is false. Economic output per hour worked has been steadily increasing in every country since their respective industrial revolutions. When you go to the source tweet, it turns out that it's comparing the developed world to the developing world. Developing economies will always grow faster, but not necessarily efficiently, because there's more…

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

Are you sure about that? Are you measuring in absolute GDP per person or rate of growth per person?

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#104

Post by AussieWog93 » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

coding123 wrote: post #80

imtringued wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this at all. Doesn't hand washing expose you to more chemicals?

It would except that I use exclusively apple cidar vinegar. not the point.

Possibly dumb question, but is there a reason you couldn't just pour vinegar into a top loader and wash in that?

Also, why apple cider over white vinegar?

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#105

Post by colinmhayes » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 10:54 PM UTC

gilmore606 wrote: post #91

colinmhayes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think bringing people joy is a positive impact?

Were those people not being brought joy before TikTok? Did the amount of joy in the world increase? Does it increase with every new frivolous app? If so eventually we will be overwhelmed with the pure bliss of being alive, but that does not seem to be the trend.

Yes TikTok increases the joy its users experienced, otherwise they would still be doing what they were doing before.

I do think people are much happier than they were 20 or even 10 years ago, largely thanks to the increased joy brought by better apps. Can that continue until people are "overwhelmed with the pure bliss of being alive"? No clue, doesn't seem likely, but it's certainly possible.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#106

Post by harryh » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #102

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause th…

> Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. So, not much then. For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades. Likewise, cheap clothe…

As for "longer life expectancy", all accounts I've read say that we got that early on in the 20th century

In the US, life expectancy at birth was around 53 in 1921. Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1040079/life-expectancy-...

It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.

Much of the rest of what you say is also inconsistent with actual data.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#107

Post by codefreakxff » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #102

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. I'm definitely better off than my parents or grandparents. Hell, we have stories in our family where my uncles would shower at the communal bathhouse cause th…

> Cheap clothes, cheap flights, cheap music, movies, cheap food, longer life expectancy, bigger homes with smaller household sizes, cheap washing machines and various appliances, all with far fewer working hours, and far less household work while you're off-work. So, not much then. For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades. Likewise, cheap clothe…

You are selectively picking one example from the parent post and making a rather personal attack. There’s no need for that. Stick to your argument and don’t make it personal.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#108

Post by b9a2cab5 » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #22

The material and capital gains of productivity improvements since the 1970s have gone to mega-corporations and their owners instead of to workers.

Median U.S. income is higher than any other large developed country, including Germany, France, the nordics, etc. More likely is that computers and automation have enabled small numbers of people to have huge impacts. If one person can create a 10% better solution that solution scales infinitely without any supply constraints to the rest of the market, creating a winner take-all effect.

Scale of impact is historically why finance and law paid well, and it's also why management gets paid more than ever now. If you as a lawyer are 10% better than your competition and you have automation to make the grunt work un-fuck-up-able, you have much more time to make decisions on many more cases. That means the gains accrue to you instead of being spread among a bunch of mediocre lawyers, whereas previously without computers you might have been limited in how much time you could spend on high value work by communication and physical constraints.

In contrast, most workers are performing jobs that are either menial (paper pushing) or automatable, which means there is no way for top performing workers to highly differentiate themselves, since there's no barrier to entry. If you look at software engineers, there is a large gap in skill and business impact between even a Fortune 500 engineer and a FAANG engineer. That gap means 1. ability to highly differentiate yourself, at least to a degree and 2. skilled engineers have huge leverage and impact which translates to higher salaries. When the skill gap ranges from "doesn't understand what a linked list is" to "started a billion dollar company" the income distribution is bound to be heavily bimodal and heavily biased towards the top.

It is no coincidence that the advent of automation and software has both caused finance and law salaries to become more bimodal, and created a highly bimodal market for software engineers themselves.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#109

Post by BeetleB » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 11:29 PM UTC

dazc wrote: post #63

MattGaiser wrote: post #24

> The Great Dissipation. One of the shocks about entering the world of work was how little I often got done in any given day because I was in a meeting or had to deal with some form or was waiting on permission or many other things. I have had whole days disappear with nothing much to show for them at the end. I am sure I am not the only one. And even though it is almost assuredly known that this happens, nobody seem…

I had a job once where I did nothing except for when I would find things to do in order to quell the boredom. When I tell people this they are usually envious but I always say 'be careful what you wish for'. For me it was the most miserable period of my life. I've had depression and been homeless - that job was worse.

Agreed. I once had a job like this - the first so many months was little to no work, because of external inefficiencies. Nice in the beginning - I used the time to learn cool stuff (Emacs, etc). But after a number of months you feel like you were put on this Earth to do something useful, and you start looking for jobs.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#110

Post by sodapopcan » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #62

MattGaiser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process A lot of it just seems to be driven by strange attempts at optimization. For example, at my company, there was a lot of time spent on figuring out developer metrics (for all four of us on the team at its peak) and cost accountability. On the cost accountability sid…

Yeah this also sounds like part of the "MBA-ification" of business. I think a lot of this comes from a reasonable goal to have: if can find appropriate metrics which represent the work your company is doing, this should give you a reasonably objective way of measuring how different interventions move you closer to or farther from your goal. But I think the problem is that actually finding and implementing those metri…

I feel a metrics are only valuable to the team itself (if they find them helpful). No one else should be looking at them because as you touch on, they are meaningless to anyone else.

My team points stories and we just that as an idea of how much work to take on for the week. If we under or overshoot, it's not a big a deal, but story points help us relay externally what will likely get done this week. No one is going to be able to look at how many points we did in a week be able to get anywhere close to an accurate representation of how much work we did. Even looking at how often we hit our mark is going to tell them nothing about our productivity.