Where has all the productivity gone? • Hacker News Board

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#181

Post by bonzini » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 9:07 AM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #140

op00to wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”?

My cursory look for some evidence suggests single mothers see dramatically elevated rates of violence and abuse. This source surveys children who live with both parents and just one. Children living with just one are seven times as likely to have witnessed someone hitting their mother in the past year than children living with both parents. I take that to mean that the increase in single motherhood means there is mor…

Or maybe those women are now single mothers because they were able to escape their abusers. You would have to compare data across decades, and adjust for people being more/less willing to disclose abuse.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#182

Post by bonzini » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 9:09 AM UTC

hellbannedguy wrote: post #126

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.

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.)

You probably should ask someone who was born in the 1920s. If you asked a middle class woman in the 50s to choose between a car and a washing machine, I would bet she would pick the washing machine.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#183

Post by alex_sf » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 9:12 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #104

coding123 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hippie bullshit, mostly.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#184

Post by forcry » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

bonzini wrote: post #180

forcry wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I would guess that those who are getting sicker at younger would just have died. Let's say hypertension is now diagnosed at 50 instead of 70. How many people used to die of a stroke between 50 and 70 due to undiagnosed hypertension?

How many people used to NOT have hypertension, and other cardiovascular issues, for want of exercises and other physical activities? Thanks to increase tech addiction in form of 24x7 chitchat using smartphones and video games..

So it technology take away some and then give back some (not without a huge cost, mind you), how can you evaluate its impact on human existence?

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#185

Post by throwawaylinux » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 9:43 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #169

throwawaylinux wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gene…

I can't load that page for some reason, and although I don't really like Krugman and certainly if it just comes from a blog with his opinion and vague handwaving in it I don't think it's worth much. But that surprises me that he would have changed his tune so quickly after being famously against HFT, e.g.,

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/opinion/03krugman.html

> It’s hard to imagine a better illustration than high-frequency trading. The stock market is supposed to allocate capital to its most productive uses, for example by helping companies with good ideas raise money. But it’s hard to see how traders who place their orders one-thirtieth of a second faster than anyone else do anything to improve that social function.

> What about Mr. Hall? The Times report suggests that he makes money mainly by outsmarting other investors, rather than by directing resources to where they’re needed. Again, it’s hard to see the social value of what he does.

> And there’s a good case that such activities are actually harmful. For example, high-frequency trading probably degrades the stock market’s function, because it’s a kind of tax on investors who lack access to those superfast computers which means that the money Goldman spends on those computers has a negative effect on national wealth.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#186

Post by throwawaylinux » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 9:48 AM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #171

throwawaylinux wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

“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?” No one ever suggested that. It’s the excess productivity growth of 1995-2005 that is largely attributable to retail and what improvements there were in the productivity of trading financial instruments.

I'm not talking about the total increase of productivity, I'm talking about the roughly 20% it increased beyond where it would have been if the pre-95 trajectory had continued. I.e., the excess. It just doesn't seem like a plausible explanation.

EDIT: going back and looking at the actual numbers rather than eyeballing it's more like 10-12% excess. That's across the entire economy of course, so it would still be a massive increase to attribute that mostly to a subset of retail and finance sectors.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#187

Post by telxos » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 11:30 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…

No doubt. We are so spoiled we just take all our advances as a given.

On top of all this so many people are doing more interesting work. My father didn't just work 7 days a week, sometimes 16 hour days but he did that doing something so boring to me I would rather be homeless or dead.

Healthcare is more expensive because it saves people's lives.

Healthcare is really the best example that we are just spoiled children who can not be satisfied no matter what Santa brings for Christmas. Even getting extra years of life isn't good enough because it "cost too much".

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#188

Post by RedXIII » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 12:01 PM UTC

telxos wrote: post #187

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…

No doubt. We are so spoiled we just take all our advances as a given. On top of all this so many people are doing more interesting work. My father didn't just work 7 days a week, sometimes 16 hour days but he did that doing something so boring to me I would rather be homeless or dead. Healthcare is more expensive because it saves people's lives. Healthcare is really the best example that we are just spoiled children…

Isn't this always true? If you were born three hundred years ago you could have just listed off some recent technological development and concluded everyone was spoiled babies.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#189

Post by Gatsky » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 12:29 PM UTC

shpongled wrote: post #168

failuser wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you that there will never be a universal cure for cancer after the person is diagnosed with cancer. The problem is not that each cancer is unique (in fact there are many common patterns and stereotyped responses to treatments) the problem is that cancer is difficult to eradicate once established. Trying to cure advanced cancer is the wrong idea, most probably, despite colossal resources deployed towards that aim. Even curing an early stage cancer is a fraught process, and some apparently cured cancers can sit dormant for 20 or 30 years before returning to be incurable.

However, I believe that there will eventually be a strategy which prevents almost all cancers. Cancer begins from one cell 100% of the time, and eliminating that cell or preventing the transformation in the first place will stop the cancer from ever developing. One way is to genetically modify the human organism to be cancer resistant. We know this is possible in theory, because there are organisms out there which seem quite resistant to cancers for their size (the naked mole rat, elephants, the bowhead whale). But rationally altering the genome of everyone on the planet is a long way off and possibly unpalatable to many. There are other more near term possibilities.

I should probably add that cancer research is my day job.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#190

Post by kharak » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 12:40 PM UTC

N00bN00b wrote: post #130

sprafa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it a strategy if it's inevitable?

I have almost no understanding of anything. Everyday I use technology that just works. What happens in the background, I'll never know. I interact with complex social systems without knowing what makes them work or how my interactions affect me and any of these systems.

All of this works, because I build simple heuristics on everything I interact with. Mostly, these heuristics are called expectations. I expect something to happen, because I don't know with certainty that it will.

"I know that I don't know".