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U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

washingtonpost.com

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Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#371

Post by zeroonetwothree »

lkrubner wrote: post #98
bdw5204 wrote: post #11

I think there's a very obvious reason for the "productivity drop": Return to Office I remember tons of studies showing that remote work had caused unprecedented increases in productivity so it seems plausible to me that companies ending it caused the productivity drop which caused the minor recession earlier this year (the big one due to the Fed's rate hikes is, I believe, still in the future). The article itself eve…

The BLS recently reported that at its peak, only 7% of Americans were working from home, so this demographic is probably too small to have much large scale impact on the productivity numbers. If there is stagnation in the productivity numbers, we should look at what the other 93% of workers are doing.

According to this it was 35% at the peak, and 7% is the current figure: https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/data-remote-workers-de...

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#372

Post by moufestaphio »

postalrat wrote: post #272
dcolkitt wrote: post #128

The very important context is that productivity sharply rose in 2020, in the middle of the Covid recession. The recent drop in productivity is mostly just a return to pre-pandemic baseline. The simplest explanation is probably just that the workers who were laid off during Covid were the least productive, and so average worker output went up, then fell as they re-entered the labor force. Or maybe even just there was…

Did you even bother to click on the article before typing your opinion of what happened? Their chart shows we are far below any sort of pre-pandemic baseline.

Not OP, but your reply comes off as pretty rude, especially as I think its pretty off base.

The chart is showing "annual percentage change in labor output", not "gross productivity" which I think supports the OPs point.

If it went up 10% in 2020, and 6.3% in 2021 (or whatever the graph is showing), just because there is a -7.4% drop in 2022 doesn't mean its "far below any pre-pandemic baseline".

In fact it's probably ABOVE pre-pandemic levels, even with the drop. I can't be certain from graph.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#373

Post by swalsh »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #27

I'm pretty sure I know why... The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc. In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games,…

I've been working from home since about 2017. I kind of echo this. In the beginning it was nice, I had a HUGE productivity boost. After a while I became disconnected from everything. The other day I realized the only adult I talk to reguarly in person is my wife. Somtimes on weekends I talk to a store clerk. Zoom meetings don't fill that missing spot, it's just work, and I have very little personal connection with any of my coworkers... Days and weeks and months seem to merge.

I'm an introverted person, I like solitude. But I guess all things in balance, it would be nice to talk to another adult once in a while about something that's not work.

I got really into Crypto, because Crypto seems to have a heavy focus on community. It was fun to fly to NY and talk to others in the community. But then I flew home, and the spot was missing again.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#374

Post by mbesto »

lanstin wrote: post #244
mbesto wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huh? if the records are "standard, digital and transferrable", it means all of the work associated with those records is sped up. - Need to retrieve past doctor visits about a patient? person at front desk no longer needs to walk to the folder closet, then scan the whole thing to find your name and then read through all of the documents to find the relevant visits. just click a button. - How about getting the prescri…

It is more productive if the person just knows if the procedure is covered because the insurance companies have stable standards and trust the medical providers rather than having it all be JIT decisions based on rules that either constantly shift or are so vague/low trust as to be "you medical person yourself can't decide if this procedure is covered, you have to call us." And back in the paper days, the staff would…

> if the person just knows if the procedure is covered because the insurance companies have stable standards and trust the medical providers rather than having it all be JIT decisions based on rules that either constantly shift or are so vague/low trust

None those are related to use or lack of use of technology. Those are purely bureaucratic rules setup by insurance carriers.

> And back in the paper days, the staff would pull up the records for the days appointments.

And sometimes those papers would get lost, or maybe they're still sitting in the folder on a door because someone forget to clean them up, or they were in the wrong order so it took the person longer to find the person's name, appointments would shift, etc. etc.

I can't believe I'm having to explain to someone the productivity advantages of a system of record to a technology focused crowd...

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#375

Post by lupire »

lkrubner wrote: post #88

I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software. But did the doctors become more productive? By almost any measure, they became less productive. People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problem…

The article is about 2022 specifically, obviously pandemic related.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#376

Post by vidanay »

conductr wrote: post #110
lkrubner wrote: post #88

I've read that doctors now spend as much as 50% of their time documenting their work. Companies such as Epic, which provide the software that hospitals use to build databases of patient data, have been big winners in the new world of hospitals-depending-on-software. But did the doctors become more productive? By almost any measure, they became less productive. People in tech keep thinking more tech will solve problem…

I don’t think productivity was ever the goal of this software. It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc. Doctors fought it as long as they could because they knew what it meant for them. I remember pretty early demos in early/mid 2000s when I was doing some clinical grunt work in college. I had written some software to make my department’s life easier so I was offered up as the hospital’s…

> It was to have a record that is standard, digital, transferable, etc.

Considering how often I have to fill out the same goddamn forms (sometimes literally down the hall in the same building as another doctor), I think that goal failed miserably.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#379

Post by ausbah »

topspin wrote: post #366
jjk166 wrote: post #362

US Worker productivity is 0.7 standard deviations below its average over the last 3 years. It is 3.6% below all time high. It is higher now than at any point before July of 2020. YOY Productivity growth has dipped negative and then went back to positive 20 times in the past 22 years. To be concerned about the current level of productivity requires either the attention span or the intelligence of a goldfish. https://t…

Always read the comments first.

usually it's the other way around

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#380

Post by [deleted] »

spookthesunset wrote: post #143
lotsofpulp wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the parents and staff at my daycare just have a collective unspoken agreement to not test for covid. The remaining Covid policies are stupidly inconsistent anyway. RSV is far more dangerous to children, but that is allowed to go unchecked. Hell, you have to pay $250+ just to get tested for it. Rhinovirus/influenza/norovirus/rotavirus/other coronaviruses are all OK, with kids leaking from both nostrils in the…

> Covid tests are paid for by government, but testing for all the other viruses costs hundreds of dollars? What a farce. Could you imagine if there was some test that showed you all the viruses that are circulating in your system at any given moment? If we applied the same rules as we do for covid to such a test, people would literally never be able to leave their house...

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