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

The Great Productivity Puzzle

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 123 posts

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#71

Post by mc32 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #36
Animats wrote: post #14

Something that's puzzled me for a while: why haven't we hit "peak office" yet? Why are there still so many people working in offices? By now, we should have many abandoned office blocks, much as we have abandoned factories in the Rust Belt. But that's not happening. We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of c…

> We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. I can't speak to the general case, but to my experience with big corporations/enterprises. Automation is rarely implemented, and when it is it's half-assed. And then a year or two later they try again, but the old system remains, and now your workers have to connect two systems manually. And then a year or two later... Not my domain, I'm busy enoug…

Maybe it takes an upstart to displace an incumbent rather than the incumbent reinventing itself. So for example you have Amazon vs Wal*Mart, Tesla vs GM... Now, some incumbets do have enough time to reconfigure (as WalMart is trying).

On the other hand... maybe corporations are better corporate citizens than we give them credit for (i.e. not everyone is a "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. who want to shed workers as quickly as possible. Maybe some actually want to keep people employed as long as they can.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#72

Post by Animats »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #57
Animats wrote: post #14

Something that's puzzled me for a while: why haven't we hit "peak office" yet? Why are there still so many people working in offices? By now, we should have many abandoned office blocks, much as we have abandoned factories in the Rust Belt. But that's not happening. We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of c…

> Are marketing cost and G&A (general and administrative) increasing as a fraction of cost of goods/services sold? Perhaps it's the overhead of capitalism. Marketing has a special feature - in a competitive market, it becomes a zero-sum game. You're putting an ever-increasing amount of money into it, but getting only marginal gains out of it. It's a coordination problem. As the industry grows, you end up with chains…

Hm. This is an argument for not allowing businesses to deduct marketing and advertising expenses.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#73

Post by joeyo »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #67
joeyo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding 1), more people means more demand for stuff only insofar as those people have money to buy stuff. In any event, you have the causal chain backwards:, increases in productivity allow for the support of a larger population; a larger population does not (by itself) lead to productivity increases. India has over a billion people, yet also much lower productivity than the US, so population alone can't be the who…

The goal is not to boost productivity but to boost GDP growth of which productivity growth is one component. A larger population, all other things being equal, leads to more GDP growth. All things are not equal when you compare India and US, so that comparison is not relevant. Compare US with current number of people vs US with 10 times fewer people. Which one is better ?

Assuming you mean GDP per-capita ... maybe? I suspect that GDP is highly correlated with productivity, anyway. Which way does the causality go?

Why should the US not have many fewer people and why couldn't that be better? There's nothing magical about 315 million people. A much smaller population would be better for ecosystems, global warming, etc. I'd demand the proviso that the population shouldn't be decimated overnight and that the age distribution can't be too skewed (too many youth or too many old). But barring that, I don't see why some lower population (even tenfold fewer) couldn't be "better".

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#74

Post by gumby »

What frustrates me about articles like this (even professional ones -- this simplifies for a general audience) is that they only look at one side of the equation. Low inflation is the opposite side, and it's interesting.

Yes, GDP$ per unit hour has not gone up much, but the flip side is that the economic value of the output has gone down. If you look in terms of PPP, workers are doing better: fewer labor hours go into buying dinner.

The corollary is that fewer hours are required to produce PPP equivalent product (e.g. a car) so fewer workers are needed (since the $ are not going up at the same rate it looks like productivity is not). That's why the LFPR is sinking.

A victorian era "smokestack" model isn't useful when looking at this world. This is why automation really is likely to cut employment this time (in fact it already is) and that's the real economic problem to be worrying about. Which some are (e.g. the small UBI experiments under way) but it's still not mainstream.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#75

Post by ashark »

douche wrote: post #30
aidos wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be misunderstanding your parent's comment but I think the question wasn't, "why are people still doing their work from offices?" and more, "what are all those people in offices still working on?" There's a lot of work that feels like it should have been automated out of existence and yet there are still lots of people working on it.

This always comes up, so I'll just leave this here: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Nothing new. The protagonist of the 1961 novel Revolutionary Road[1] by Richard Yates works a job that's mostly just figuring out ways to send stuff from his INBOX to other people with the right kind of notes on it to either delay its coming back for another day or two, or, ideally, result in someone else (many, many note-added forwards later) having to deal with it, and to look busy the rest of (most of) the time. Most of the people in his company apparently work this way. Much of the work itself seems to be generated by people trying to find something to do so they seem busy, rather than for any useful purpose. This doesn't come off as parody, either, but as depicting a situation very close to common reality for office workers at that time, with little or no exaggeration.

(incidentally, the novel is great, still reads fresh, and is not primarily about work life in the 1950s/60s)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#76

Post by Qworg »

Spooky23 wrote: post #64
thedevil wrote: post #2

A few rants (mixed in with a few half-baked ideas): 1) Economic progress from the industrial revolution is about quantity. We learned to make a lot more stuff. The industrial revolution is not quite done, but the impact is less and less every decade. We may never match that quantity growth of stuff because we don't even want more stuff, we only want better stuff. And we're getting better stuff and more variety. 2) In…

You're wrong about one thing... The low skill jobs didn't vanish. They moved to places where wages and regulation (safety, environmental, etc) are less. The people who made Fisher Price toys in East Aurora, NY were made redundant by equally low/moderate skill workers in Mexico and later China. Your undershirt was made in North Carolina until the late 80s, and shifted to a variety of places until it hit the bottom --…

Are they the same price in 2006's dollars?

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#77

Post by ThomPete »

Spooky23 wrote: post #64
thedevil wrote: post #2

A few rants (mixed in with a few half-baked ideas): 1) Economic progress from the industrial revolution is about quantity. We learned to make a lot more stuff. The industrial revolution is not quite done, but the impact is less and less every decade. We may never match that quantity growth of stuff because we don't even want more stuff, we only want better stuff. And we're getting better stuff and more variety. 2) In…

You're wrong about one thing... The low skill jobs didn't vanish. They moved to places where wages and regulation (safety, environmental, etc) are less. The people who made Fisher Price toys in East Aurora, NY were made redundant by equally low/moderate skill workers in Mexico and later China. Your undershirt was made in North Carolina until the late 80s, and shifted to a variety of places until it hit the bottom --…

Outsourcing is the last step before automation.

You have to follow your own rationale here trough.

What happens when mexicans become richer and also concerned about safety at workplace because now they can afford to worry about it?

This is why even china is outsourcing to even cheaper places, robotics or why when production sometimes comes back it's in fully automated factories.

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#78

Post by iofj »

mc32 wrote: post #71
Jtsummers wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have all this office automation, but too many people in offices. I can't speak to the general case, but to my experience with big corporations/enterprises. Automation is rarely implemented, and when it is it's half-assed. And then a year or two later they try again, but the old system remains, and now your workers have to connect two systems manually. And then a year or two later... Not my domain, I'm busy enoug…

Maybe it takes an upstart to displace an incumbent rather than the incumbent reinventing itself. So for example you have Amazon vs Wal*Mart, Tesla vs GM... Now, some incumbets do have enough time to reconfigure (as WalMart is trying). On the other hand... maybe corporations are better corporate citizens than we give them credit for (i.e. not everyone is a "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap. who want to shed workers as quickly as p…

Maybe people simply have different goals. For instance, it seems pretty obvious to me that no mass-layoffs (and thus a limit on productivity increases in that company) was a condition of the Obama administration's helping out of GM, and the same goes for the various Euro governments who did the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reor...

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#79

Post by eridius »

gumby wrote: post #74

What frustrates me about articles like this (even professional ones -- this simplifies for a general audience) is that they only look at one side of the equation. Low inflation is the opposite side, and it's interesting. Yes, GDP$ per unit hour has not gone up much, but the flip side is that the economic value of the output has gone down . If you look in terms of PPP, workers are doing better: fewer labor hours go in…

What is PPP?

Re: The Great Productivity Puzzle

#80

Post by taneq »

thedevil wrote: post #2

A few rants (mixed in with a few half-baked ideas): 1) Economic progress from the industrial revolution is about quantity. We learned to make a lot more stuff. The industrial revolution is not quite done, but the impact is less and less every decade. We may never match that quantity growth of stuff because we don't even want more stuff, we only want better stuff. And we're getting better stuff and more variety. 2) In…

> We may never match that quantity growth of stuff because we don't even want more stuff, we only want better stuff.

This was my thought. This kind of measurement of the economy conflates maximum potential productivity with market demand, in essence assuming a supply-limited scenario. We've reached the point now where most people in first-world countries have as much as they want of most things that aren't super new, super expensive or super high tech. Production is now demand-limited.

Post reply on HN