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Where has all the productivity gone?

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Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#161

Post by hedora »

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…

I think you’re reading too much into “life expectancy at birth”. Life expectancy at age 20 hasn’t moved nearly as much. The big wins were reductions in deaths during childhood.

Not to sound harsh, but the main economic benefit is that now people need to have fewer children to maintain a stable population.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#162

Post by Negitivefrags »

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…

That statistic sounds totally wrong and after looking at your source it is highly misleading. It’s just if the parents were married at birth.

Of the people I know with kids like 50% of them were not married when they started having kids. They either got married latter or never married because there was no advantage to do so and they didn’t care.

Yet none of them are what you would call “single mothers”. They are all still together with the fathers of their children.

So basically it says more about marriage than it does about parenting.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#163

Post by forcry »

hedora wrote: post #160
forcry wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

The main vaccine “innovation” was that the FDA decided to finally approve an mRNA therapy. Moderna’s been trying to get such things approved for about a decade. So, the “breakthrough” was a brief suspension of questionable bureaucratic barriers. (Temporary suspension of “Dissipation” from the article.)

>So, the “breakthrough” was a brief suspension of questionable bureaucratic barriers. (Temporary suspension of “Dissipation” from the article.)

So as I doubted.

Naturally, the next question would be "What was the questionable bureaucratic barriers" that was temporary suspended. It really blows my mind that the answers to this is not widely known. It is kind of disturbing..

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#164

Post by ageofwant »

For me it has gone into being 'Agile'. 'Agile' has been the largest single worse thing to happen to software development in my experience. It may be appropriate for small shops fighting for their lives, but as a 'waterfall' replacement it has no discernable productivity benefits. It just seems to generate a lot of working the work.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#165

Post by 2ion »

The Great Incompetence: Factor productivity increases only if the factor (=new technology) can be fully applied. A better factor can even decrease productivity if less of it applies than from the previous factor (=old technology). I'd say that most people make neither the fullest nor any reasonable use of technology, especially information technology as far as the office and standard company processes are concerned. Either they can't, or simply won't, either by their own volition or by instruction.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#166

Post by lkrubner »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #151
lkrubner wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have a source for that? You're saying a productivity increase that amounted to around 20% across the entire workforce is mostly attributable to advances in HFT and logistics in the retail industry? Even if we ignore that both of those were probably only made possibly with computers, that seems astounding considering retail and finance makes up less than 20% of the economy by GDP.

The link should be here, if Google was working:

solow hft retail site:krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

At the moment Google is acting as if Krugman never mentioned HFT or retail.

Adding to the problem, the New York Times is giving 503 errors over most of Krugman’s old weblog, so perhaps the Times has given up on maintaining the old blog.

Am I allowed to make the joke that Solow’s Productivity Paradox is mostly explained by rampant link rot? But I’m only half kidding, because the rapid way technology breaks down is an obvious hindrance to productivity.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#167

Post by ALittleLight »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #162
ALittleLight wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That statistic sounds totally wrong and after looking at your source it is highly misleading. It’s just if the parents were married at birth. Of the people I know with kids like 50% of them were not married when they started having kids. They either got married latter or never married because there was no advantage to do so and they didn’t care. Yet none of them are what you would call “single mothers”. They are all…

If you have better data I'm happy to look at that. I agree that cohabiting are likely more common now and it is possibly more common to get married just after birth than it used to be.

Table CH-1 from this census website shows that children living with a single parent goes from 10% in 1960 to 36% in 2020. (=E13/C13) I'm not certain but I think they are accounting for cohabiting parents here because they don't use any language related to marriage and the census could tell if the parents were cohabiting or not.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/families...

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#168

Post by shpongled »

failuser wrote: post #31
fhssn1 wrote: post #19

'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (…

Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…

I hate to tell you, but there is not, and never will be a cure for cancer. Every cancer is unique. The best we can hope for in a realistic time frame is a set of drugs that cover a significant portion of the lineage dependencies corresponding to a majority of the the most common cancers. Ideally, we will be able to drug/ligand every human protein, but we're still a long way off.

Furthermore, science isn't necessarily a tractable problem that scales linearly with the amount of manpower thrown at it - many of our greatest discoveries have happened serendipitously.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#169

Post by lkrubner »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #151
lkrubner wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you have a source for that? You're saying a productivity increase that amounted to around 20% across the entire workforce is mostly attributable to advances in HFT and logistics in the retail industry? Even if we ignore that both of those were probably only made possibly with computers, that seems astounding considering retail and finance makes up less than 20% of the economy by GDP.

So here is a link that is a few years earlier than the one I want, but which covers the productivity numbers in the same way:

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/reagan-mythbust...

But that was written in 2009, before it was clear that productivity slowed again after 2005.

In a later post, Krugman analyzed the higher productivity of 1995 to 2005 and shows much of it was simply big box stores and HFT.

In general, the period since 1973 has been disappointing for productivity. And as yet, computers have not brought us the kind of sustained productivity growth that we saw in the early to mid 20th Century.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#170

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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