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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

#491

Post by ummonk »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #152
mcguire wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, how much money changes hands off of how much workers work?

If this is a good faith question, you can answer it by reference to any good economics text; or even, you know, Wikipedia. But it feels like maybe it's not. Here's another example: you volunteer at a homeless shelter, where you serve food on a soup kitchen line. You have contributed to the GDP of the United States. By all means, feel free to fit this into your preferred framework.

This is just factually incorrect. Volunteering at a homeless shelter does not contribute to US GDP.

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

#492

Post by ummonk »

jasmer wrote: post #308
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is a good faith question, you can answer it by reference to any good economics text; or even, you know, Wikipedia. But it feels like maybe it's not. Here's another example: you volunteer at a homeless shelter, where you serve food on a soup kitchen line. You have contributed to the GDP of the United States. By all means, feel free to fit this into your preferred framework.

Yeah I don't think this is true. GDP is an economic measurement, not some kind of intrinsic thing. So you can make a beautiful thing for your home - not GDP. Make it and give it to someone - not GDP either. Pretty sure money has to change hands, or in the case of government, we measure it as $ spent.

Indeed, the value of volunteering is not counted in US GDP.

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

#493

Post by jimmygrapes »

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…

> [...] they type in some random 3 letter code and a screen would pop up. Then they would memorize how many tabs each field was apart from each other. Without a mouse, people could just hum along imputing data a blazing speed once some muscle memory was in place. Everyone had little cheat sheets printed out for the less frequently used commands/codes.

This comports with my most recent experience using SAP in 2018. I know, I know, SAP has GUIs and such now. This well known and profitable corporation under the Blackstone umbrella, though? Nope. It was exactly as you describe.

Those who had the time-in-service or the mentality to accept it excelled at their job, but uniformly skewed older (late 40s and up) or younger (under 25). At the time, almost everyone aged in between was entirely befuddled by it all.

Context: supply chain, procurement, purchasing, logistics, maintenance, work orders, inventory

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

#496

Post by asvitkine »

scarface74 wrote: post #353
badpun wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to pay for better GUIs in enterprise software, so no vendor puts any attention into them. An Enterprise Architect explicitly explained to me (when I was raising a point of choosing a software package that had much better UI) that good UX is a small factor and company (a bank in that case) would rather buy cheaper software and just have its workers suffer more, because it's deemed more cost-effective.

The definition of enterprise software is “the customer is not the user”. You don’t have to make the user happy, just the CxO.

Wouldn't productivity from better UI be something measurable that can be then advertised by vendors and extrapolated into savings for the customer? I feel like that could be a pretty compelling selling point to the CxOs.

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

#497

Post by AnthonBerg »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #457
AnthonBerg wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many, many scientists who are attempting to warn us that isn’t nothing. The literature is piling up. Paper: Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection – https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-021-01113-x Paper: “Excess risk for acute myocardial infarction mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic” — https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.28187 Paper: “p53/NF-kB Balance…

All of these seem to say the risks of complications are extremely rare? I mean it's endemic at this point so it's really really shitty if you are one of the unlucky few but what can we even do? > We can clean this crap out of the air. Nobody has to breathe in SARS-CoV-2. ?? What do you even mean. Maybe if the vaccine prevented spreading the virus we could but until we develop that I don't see how that is possible.

With SARS-CoV-2, complications are more common than death, and it’s still among the top reasons why people die.

Re. cleaning it out of the air: It’s literally airborne and it can literally be cleaned out of the air.

When infected, people emit tiny fluid particles which contain the virus. These are so small that they don’t fall to the ground. Filter materials like in HEPA filters and respirator masks strip these particles out of the air. Very effectively. (Surgical masks don’t work. Same kind of material, gaps at the sides. It doesn’t work.)

We can literally clean the air. We do not have to breathe this virus in. That’s just one of the things we can do.

Paper: “Effectiveness of HEPA Filters at Removing Infectious SARS-CoV-2 from the Air” – https://doi.org/10.1128/msphere.00086-22

Paper: “The Removal of Airborne Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Other Microbial Bioaerosols by Air Filtration on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Surge Units” – https://doi.org/10.1093/cid/ciab933

“Ten scientific reasons in support of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2” – https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(21)00869-2

Why am I saying all of this?

Because I have a moral obligation to do so.

Why do I know this?

I don’t know anything. I’ve just read those scientific papers.

Why did I read them?

Because high-risk pregnancy.

But does it apply outside of high-risk pregnancy?

Yes.

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

#498

Post by whodidntante »

"The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus pandemic forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when “quiet quitting” — doing only what’s expected and no more — is resonating, especially with younger workers."

Perplexing,really ? I do not find this perplexing at all. Maybe productivity increased at the beginning of the pandemic because people were afraid of losing their jobs. Maybe once people realized they could work from home and not worry too much about getting fired, they are simply letting gravity take its course and finding out how little they need to do to keep their jobs, or if they even care if they keep their jobs.

Look what has happened to remote education. We may now have a damaged generation.

Yes, for certain people in certain jobs, working from home can be a productivity boost. This is not true for the general population.

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

#499

Post by [deleted] »

dfxm12 wrote: post #397
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…

It's just the corporation friendly mass media trying to combat calls for better worker treatment/compensation. This is just the next single from the album that brought us "quiet quitting", "the great resignation", "millennials are lazy", etc. It's important for the backers of these media outlets to float these stories out there, lest anyone become sympathetic to workers in light of the facts that minimum wage hasn't…

[deleted]

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

#500

Post by benrow »

grumple wrote: post #175

This headline is alarmist and the article itself is designed to manipulate people unfamiliar with the productivity metric or its recent movement. Note that the article and the graph are about the % change in productivity... which spiked sharply during the pandemic and has now returned to the growth line it was on prior. Here's the fed numbers: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB The productivity drop the OP is…

There should be a name for the logical fallacy where direction of travel of a statistic is taken out of context. Local fluctuation being taken as the beginning of a trend. Perhaps just "short-sightedness", but it's more specific - inference of future events based on short term signals.

It's really common in news about the economy. I guess the outcome is really important, but we only have these instantaneous signals. So something like superstition kicks in (when we're not carefully considering what is stated).

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