The Great Productivity Puzzle • Hacker News Board

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#121

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Aug 13, 2016, 3:28 AM UTC

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…

That sounds like people are trying to make a new system that does everything. Why is nobody making a system that leaves existing components the same, and just does the syncing? One task at a time, in a way that physically cannot cause you to have more partially-connected databases.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#122

Post by codingmyway » Mon, Aug 15, 2016, 9:36 AM UTC

redwood wrote: post #98

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…

Completely agree: automation is already changing the employment landscape. The number of people who tell me how the unemployed truck driver or factory worker can become a robot designer boggles my mind. It's a total break-down in the ability to see quantities vividly for what they are. I grew up in a field where orders of magnitude were the first class citizen and it's clear that order of magnitudes more people do mu…

Not while there is work to do. So long as there is a need for more housing, bridges to be repaired and roads to be maintained and anything else that can't be automated and can be trained for then government should employ people to do those jobs and quit with the nonsense that only the private sector can add value.

If there is shortage of skilled workers to do those jobs then they should train them too. The lack of long term job security has lead to the end of loyalty which means private companies have no incentive to train people which means the unemployed have to take on debt to study courses which aren't necessarily giving the skills they need. That and companies need to start sponsoring and training and accept that some will end up at a competitor.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#123

Post by redwood » Wed, Aug 17, 2016, 12:03 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #115

redwood wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree: automation is already changing the employment landscape. The number of people who tell me how the unemployed truck driver or factory worker can become a robot designer boggles my mind. It's a total break-down in the ability to see quantities vividly for what they are. I grew up in a field where orders of magnitude were the first class citizen and it's clear that order of magnitudes more people do mu…

Automation has always increased employment in the long term . And maybe it will this time as well: the truck drivers will not become robot designers but their kids could, instead of becoming truck drivers as well. The fact is that we don't live in the long term so although truck driving and coal mining are shitty jobs (and absolutely should be automated or eliminated) we have to take care of the current practitioners…

I could not disagree more. We are probably working the least hours as a total number of waking hours of the total population than we ever have as a species. Automation has always decreased the amount of work that needed to be done. Now admittedly "work needing to be done" is different from "employment" but I would argue that the less work that needs to be done, the less easy it is to create paying jobs to pay people to do those non-things. Yes many of the "workers" of the 1800s were domestic and not counted on wage payrolls... and we had a lot of them shift into the "work force" and begin getting wages in the 1900s. But that's not to say there is a net trend away from work and pay rolls. If we don't wake up and see this problem the inequality situation will continue to get worse.