Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where has all the productivity gone?

johndcook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 219 posts

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#191

Post by _sillymarketing »

RedXIII wrote: post #188
telxos wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True in recent history, but not always. For 200k years, humans lived the same exact life as their parents.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#192

Post by 988747 »

frankbreetz wrote: post #68
failuser wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientific research is not a high school problem where the clear algorithm is known. A lot of approaches need to tries before valid ones are found. And for cancer a single approach is most likely not enough.

The grandparent talks about going from 1,000 to to 10,000, not a single researcher. Are you implying the law of diminishing returns doesn't apply to research?

But how do the first researcher choose the approach "with the highest probability of working"? Since the research hasn't been conducted yet they can only use their own previous experience, also known as bias. Judging by the results the approaches to cure cancer that were pursued first haven't been very effective.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#193

Post by kharak »

dcolkitt wrote: post #21
toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone churning out Tiktok, Clubhouse, and Robinhood while we need more SpaceX and Teslas. I’m unsure how to tilt the equation so solving for hard (necessary) engineering is more profitable (or lower risk) than window dressing.

TikTok, Clubhouse and Robinhood have touched the lives of orders of magnitudes more people than Tesla or SpaceX. Tesla sold half a million cars last year. TikTok provided entertainment for a billion people.

I believe this is the major problem. During all times, humanity spends most of it resources to make more of the same. Does this world really need another social network? More movies? Games? Novels? Fashion? More e-commerce that is reselling existing products in new design?

All of this work doesn't change a single thing. It's more of the same. Tomorrow, it'll be replaced by more of the same. Maybe it'll not be replaced, just added to a growing pile of more of the same.

The space industry has a shot at changing humanities future. So does the aging industry, prosthetics, robotics, ai, fusion and others. It might not work out, but if it does, it'll change something.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#194

Post by harryh »

hedora wrote: post #161
harryh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Frankly, as a parent, I think "fewer dead children" is a pretty big deal. Perhaps one of the biggest improvements in human welfare that one would hope to see in society.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#195

Post by harryh »

coldtea wrote: post #146
harryh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As you can see from my link, life expectancy at birth was around 67 in 1950. There has been an 18% increase since then.

You continue to make claims that are inconsistent with the data.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#196

Post by kktkti9 »

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…

There are internal corporate studies out there that try to determine which manager or technology brought productivity gains.

The math is so complex they could not draw any conclusions.

Understand; we listened to lesser educated men of the previous generation about building business and economy. Men who missed out on our early education in science, and who were often far more religious. Men who had much different political narratives to satisfy; IBM was gifted government research. How many of our startups are?

Brookings conveniently avoids discussing the weakening political power of the US over the decades; easy to grow when the world needs you to manufacture for it after WW2.

It’s not hard for me to believe much of our economic theory is bullshit, and output is driven by political arrangements. Humans will generate economic activity naturally to survive. One can only induce so much superfluous activity beyond that.

Humans have a history of ignorantly extrapolating the wrong conclusions from reality.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#197

Post by Godel_unicode »

hedora wrote: post #161
harryh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard this argument a surprising number of times, and I must say I find this degree of callousness about dead children to be utterly horrifying.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#198

Post by Godel_unicode »

forcry wrote: post #134
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…

>Why will 5G be widely adopted? I think we should reject 5G as a community. Not because any danger of radiation. But I think people should be able to say "This is enough", and stop ourselves to be forced to think "We need moar!", thus put some block to this progress for the sake of progress..

Yeah, and what's with these mechanised looms, hand-operated is fine.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#199

Post by Godel_unicode »

perl4ever wrote: post #129
Fricken wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Y…

And if you're poor and have to live far from your job (because you're poor) screw you? There are a lot of people who will be locked out of driving by this because they don't have the float to overpay for gasoline and wait for the refund.

If the US had better public transit options, then maybe. But you have to do that first.

Re: Where has all the productivity gone?

#200

Post by patrick451 »

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…

> It's a particularly interesting time to discount the life extension benefits of modern technology. We just saw multiple vaccines get developed and deployed in record time to significantly reduce the death toll from a worldwide pandemic. It's unlikely we would have seen this remarkable success even a decade ago.

Which appear to be uniquely dangerous and ineffective, so it's odd to use them as an example of progress. Besides that, mRNA is not a new thing. What's new is the EUA.

Post reply on HN