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Where has all the productivity gone?

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Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#141

Post by forcry »

harryh wrote: post #106
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…

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 develo…

>Today it's almost 79. That's a nearly 50% increase.

What about the quality of life? We know that people are getting sicker at a younger age, and if we consider that in addition to the ever increasing cost of the treatments, it does not appear to be a net positive.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#142

Post by forcry »

harryh wrote: post #106
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…

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 develo…

>We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time

But can you show me the exact breakthrough that came by this pouring of resources into the research, and that enabled such vaccines, by removing blockers that blocked such vaccines for decades?

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#144

Post by CapricornNoble »

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…

>>>No change, I expect, in the children's suffering

Drug use, gang activity, and other criminality are all positively correlated with single-parent households, and some data shows even MORE positively correlated with single-mother, as opposed to single-father, households.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/single-p...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316649639_The_effec...

https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/report/the-real-r....

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#146

Post by coldtea »

harryh wrote: post #106
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…

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 develo…

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

This has nothing to do with productivity rise and where do we see its results (what is discussed here), but about the merits of technology.

Even so, the raise in life expectancy at birth is about those low hanging hygiene practices (nothing to do with post 1950 techology) and a few vaccines (most of which available before 1950s).

Not any big technological breakthroughs, like artificial hearts and so on (which hardly make a dent), and with extremely little to do with any post 1950s tech.

So the question of the article in the domain still remains, where's all this benefit from the productivity rise.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#147

Post by coldtea »

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.

Ask a working single mother is she would trade "inexpensive, effective appliances" to 1960s era healthcare, housing/rent, and education costs, and working/middle class job availability.

The answer might suprise you...

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#148

Post by chii »

hellbannedguy wrote: post #128
jrockway wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The fact that more entertainment is available is the growth in wealth, not that it is suitable for your tastes.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#149

Post by erik_seaberg »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #138
perl4ever wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Y…

I've come around to the idea that we should put excise taxes on the sale of new cars that use fossil fuels and use the revenue to help working class people replace their existing gasoline cars with electric[1]. The idea is help people do what you want them to do instead of apply the rubber hose. [1] One way to think about that is you force people buying new cars to be carbon neutral by paying to retire existing cars.

I need to see most streets and apartment lots lined with chargers. I don’t personally have permission to install any.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#150

Post by Gibbon1 »

lkrubner wrote: post #132
throwawaylinux wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

I can not take credit for Solow Productivity Paradox, all credit needs to go to Solow himself. The uptick in productivity between 1995 and 2005 is mostly attributable to 2 sectors: retail finance In retail, it was the era of big boxes, lead by WalMart. Basically, it was the era when big retail learned how to take advantage of big databases to better manage inventory. Sadly, this did not seem to be the beginning of a…

One of my thoughts is the hard return on efficiency isn't linear.

140 years ago generators were 60% efficient. 20 years later 96% efficient. That's big close to 40% better. 20 years after that 98% efficient. 4% better... Now maybe 99.5% so 1.5% better.

I feel like a lot of things they through computers at to improve productivity are kind already efficient. My mom's first washing machine washed clothes. Mine with a microcomputer also washes clothes. Parents first microwave had a power dial and a mechanical timer. You reheat food in it. Mine with a computer also reheats food.

There is no real fundamental change here.

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