Where has all the productivity gone? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#121

Post by vp8989 » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 12:42 AM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #72

skohan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You Can't Improve What You Can't Measure Disease YCIWYCM is a great way to kill productivity and performance improvement efforts when taken too far. Sometimes, you've just got to go with your gut. The amount of effort needed to make measurements, especially for less tangible knowledge work, can kill productivity overall. Often, the measurable parts are at the conclusion of a particular effort, the total time it took…

This empiricism theater that so many engage in these days is just another form of CYA.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#122

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 12:43 AM UTC

nonameiguess wrote: post #115

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…

Amen. You know what? I paid double what my parents paid for the house I really think of as my childhood house that they bought in 1989, and I paid more than quadruple what they paid for our actual first house in 1979. But my house is also double the size, it's downtown in a major metro, I'm not going to have to rebuild it from the inside out because it's not falling apart and everything already works. There is no asb…

[deleted]

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#123

Post by BeFlatXIII » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 12:53 AM UTC

skohan wrote: post #50

> The Great Dissipation. Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process, and very little real work gets done. To be honest, I think it might be an inevitability of the productivity boom. Thanks to technology and automation, it's possible for a single individual to accom…

> If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the products of their creativity.

The problem arises when my creativity arises from finding new uses for your invention. Whose creativity was the end result? It’s clear that the moral rights should be split, but fairly determining that split for legal accounting is near-impossible. As a concrete example, look to the endless lawsuits over unauthorized music sampling against other musicians.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#124

Post by op00to » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #116

op00to wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You couldn’t be more wrong, or more dismissive. Ask a working single mother whether inexpensive, effective appliances are a significant productivity and quality of life enhancer.

This reminds me of Simpson's Paradox in the sense that it may be true that life is better for a single mother because modern appliances make life easier but it is also true that society has greatly increased the number of single mothers. In 1980 18% of births were to single mothers compared to 40% in 2020[1]. It's possible that the amount of single mother suffering has increased even though the suffering per single m…

Again, we can go deeper. How many single mothers would be forced to remain in otherwise abusive situations but for the fact that she is able to both work and care for her family due to “progress”?

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#125

Post by Fricken » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 1:05 AM 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…

Itt: people being willfully ignorant about climate change.

If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#126

Post by hellbannedguy » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC

op00to wrote: post #111

coldtea wrote: post #102

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. 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 couldn’t be more wrong, or more dismissive. Ask a working single mother whether inexpensive, effective appliances are a significant productivity and quality of life enhancer.

Wow--

I have never heard anyone say, "Bosh made my life easier"

And it reminds me I'm on my second pump for a E12 error.

(After tossing too many Bosh appliances, I finally got lucky repairing one. The guys on the internet helped.)

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#127

Post by throwawaylinux » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #86

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…

Those are PPP numbers, which means they are a total joke. The graph you post does not show the post war boom, nor does it show the productivity stagnation after 1973. The USA went from 3% per year productivity growth, before 1973, to 1.5% productivity growth after 1973. None of that is visible in the chart because the chart is using PPP numbers. But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on computers, and s…

> But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on computers, and so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to productivity?

Just going by eye, there is a pretty sharp trend upward from about 1990-2005, which I think roughly corresponds to the period when the bulk of computerization happened in homes, offices, schools, as well as being put to use in many of the most important embedded applications -- factories and machinery, automobiles, etc.

Eyeballing the trend before 1990 has it continuing to low-$50s, instead it's mid-$60s, a 20% increase.

So why do you think this graph shows computers don't seem to add anything to productivity? I'm not saying they have, but I can't see how that graph demonstrates they haven't.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#128

Post by hellbannedguy » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #117

coldtea wrote: post #102

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. 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…

> For the consumer devices, cheap = disposable, as opposed to consumer devices you bought and could use for decades. How nicely should a consumer device be made? I feel like technological improvements make the device obsolete and disposable, so making the build quality higher just artificially slows down iteration time. (Why will 5G be widely adopted? Because eventually everyone will drop their 4G phone down the stai…

In terms of entertainment, I was happy with 40 cable channels, and seeing a great movie every once in awhile.

Hell, I was happy kid watching free cartoons on the Zenith?

While tech got bettter talent seems to have nosed dived? (exception being a lot of free talent on youtube)

The pure talent of the 60's-70's was magic, and that era was before my time?

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#129

Post by perl4ever » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 2:45 AM UTC

Fricken wrote: post #125

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…

Itt: people being willfully ignorant about climate change. If we have to destroy the planet to have these things, which we are, then none of it is productive. Quite the opposite.

I make about 20% of what people claim the SV crowd earns.

I just filled up my gas tank. It cost me about $23, or around 6 cents per mile. Somewhere around $3.

I could still afford to drive a fair amount even if gas cost ten times what it does now. There's no guarantee that would reduce demand enough.

But if gas was made extremely expensive, then aren't we going to see this, but bigger?

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests

My idea is to have a huge fuel tax, but to return it to each citizen in equal amounts, not use it for general purposes, so that people who really need to burn a lot of fuel can, but those who don't are incentivized not to.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#130

Post by N00bN00b » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 3:00 AM UTC

sprafa wrote: post #59

wpasc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Joel Spolsky kind of covers a possible answer to your question in his blog post "Hitting the High Notes"[0]. While I'm sure there's plenty of counter examples, it's important to note a wide ranging variety of discoveries and breakthroughs that have come from individuals and small teams that have. In many of these cases, that person or small team is uniquely breaking against an otherwise agreed upon convention or…

another way to look at it is that cargo cult thinking is the default mode for human thinking. This is something I've noticed recently and increasingly believe to be true. The vast majority of people do NOT take the time to build an opinion from weighing multiple sources of information, looking for counter arguments etc. Cargo cult is the default mode for a civilization.

That has to be true, right? There's just way too much to understand and it's impossible to come up with an absolute ordering of importance. At some point you have to delegate huge chunks of your understanding.

And it works 9 out of 10 times. It's just that one time that's a problem, but it's still probably the most optimal strategy for nearly everyone.