17 ms·

Where has all the productivity gone?

236 points by wellpast 5y ago

robjan 5y ago
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 low hanging fruit to pick. These low hanging fruit can be picked by throwing more people at the problem (increasing workforce participation or working longer hours). One example is how much more time it takes to build infrastructure in America vs China. If you look at the data[0], productivity in both countries is growing at roughly the same rate. It pretty much invalidates the assertion in the blog and the source tweet. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?country=USA~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  As much as I dislike Chinas ruling party, their government is a model of efficiency when compared to the USA and it mostly gets out of peoples way. Contrast that with US government where taxes, vehicle registration, and judicial process is perhaps decades behind despite having more resources. There is something about complacency common to all democracies that never up well. The old refrain "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time" applies just as much today.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  > These low hanging fruit can be picked by throwing more people at the problem (increasing workforce participation or working longer hours). I haven't read the article yet, but note increasing workforce participation or working hours doesn't increase productivity - that just increases the denominator for the productivity calculation, and unless it increases the numerator faster there is no productivity increase.
  - robjan 5y ago
    This is why I said "not necessarily efficiently". At a very macro level, you can increase economic output by either working more or increasing efficiency (productivity per hour).
- alexgmcm 5y ago
  I think the tweet linked to by OP is using the colloquial definition of productivity (i.e. I can get more stuff done) and uses examples of computer technology etc. This isn't to be confused with the economic definition of GDP per hour worked - which has far more to do with the sectors of industry that a country has. After all, a few financiers doing million-dollar deals is always going to generate more GDP per hour than coltan miners, even though it's not obvious which is actually generating more wealth. Robert F Kennedy famously said the GNP "measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile".
  - failuser 5y ago
    You increase what you optimize for. GDP increase is the stated goal of most current societies and they work to achieve it.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  GDP doesn't take into consideration public debt. If public debt is up 100% and GDP has barely changed - I don't think that's cause for celebration that GDP / hours worked = we are more productive. I'm not saying this is the case. But people use GDP a lot to make points like this - and it's important to talk about how much public debt is increasing GDP.
  - skywal_l 5y ago
    If you are in a country where pensions are managed by the state, your contributions are considered taxes. If you are in a country with a private pension system, your contributions are in the GDP! The GDP is not a scientific measure. It is an ideological concept. It doesn't mean it is useless, but it should not be taken at face value.
    - karatinversion 5y ago
      Taxed income isn’t subtracted from income in national accounts though...?
- lkrubner 5y ago
  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 so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to productivity? See: The Solow Productivity Paradox: What Do Computers Do to Productivity? https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-paradox-what-do-computers-do-to-productivity/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa... McKinsey wrote this in 2018, predicting a productivity boom was coming soon, though of course this prediction has been made often since 1973, and the only time it was even slightly true was during the boom in big box retail 1995-2005: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/is-the-solow-paradox-back# https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital... It's well known that in the 1800s the telegraph and then the telephone allowed a large scale re-organization of capital, and capital invested heavily to take advantage of the new technologies, but it was impossible to see a productivity benefit. These technologies allowed new systems of control, but not necessarily any productivity benefit. Since 1970 computer network technologies have offered a similar reorganization, but they are vastly more powerful than the telephone, and they allowed a re-organization that was vastly more profound than any previous reorganization of capital. Millions of jobs were outsourced to India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and then Brazil, Russia, Romania, etc.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    > But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on computers, and so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to productivity? Just going by eye, there is a pretty sharp trend upward from about 1990-2005, which I think roughly corresponds to the period when the bulk of computerization happened in homes, offices, schools, as well as being put to use in many of the most important embedded applications -- factories and machinery, automobiles, etc. Eyeballing the trend before 1990 has it continuing to low-$50s, instead it's mid-$60s, a 20% increase. So why do you think this graph shows computers don't seem to add anything to productivity? I'm not saying they have, but I can't see how that graph demonstrates they haven't.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >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?".
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    It might be that we're spending the increased productivity on temporary things rather than long-lived things. For example, spending $1M on keeping a retired cancer patient alive. That's good for them, good for their family, good for lots of people to feel like they'll have a chance of survival if they get it, but it doesn't cause a new bridge to be built, etc. The technology improves, the knowledge improves, but those things aren't visible on a skyline. It might also be things like higher quality food, varieties of food, yachts for the rich that most of us don't ever see, or things like that, things that are either consumed and don't accumulate wealth, or things that are relatively long lived and durable but not part of most people's lives because most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. Other ideas: paper pushing services like handling unnecessarily large volumes of litigation just to run a business, which requires work and causes GDP to go up but doesn't produce actual products.
  - IkmoIkmo 5y ago
    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 their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because international calls were so expensive. We flew every few years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs, and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that till death. I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare and college having become drastically more expensive. (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity allowing new measures of wealth for many. If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets. Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity increases in lower/middle income countries, too.
- babesh 5y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?stackMode=relative&country=USA~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho... Are you sure about that? Are you measuring in absolute GDP per person or rate of growth per person?
egypturnash 5y ago
The Great Disparity In Income surely has nothing to do with it. If the boss is making absurd multipliers of your income and barely paying you enough to get by, the last thing you wanna do is get your work done as fast as possible. Pad those hours, give yourself the raise the boss never will. Take stuff from work.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rdiddly 5y ago
  Acknowledging receipt of the King Missile reference!
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    <3
sudeepj 5y ago
Productivity compared to which time in the past? If we compare productivity today compared to say 1960/1950 then we have definitely improved. We can manufacture at speed & scale. We can communicate with people across the continents like never before. We can work-from-home to a large extent than ever before. We can destroy each other at much grander scale like never before. But like any system, any improvement in efficiency results in shifting the bottlenecks. It never truly goes away. The nature of the bottleneck may be different but its there. The things like "forms, compliance, process" are the new bottlenecks. Technology is a means to an end. It cannot be the end itself (at a macro level). Tech is by humans, for humans and of humans. Humans will always be the centerpiece for time to come (unless AI becomes so good as they potray in sci-fi films/tv-series).
coding123 5y ago
> This is what happened with the introduction of household appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for example, we do laundry more often. I have thoroughly debunked this commonly referenced saying. I don't have a washer and a dryer any more and I can't go into laundromats because Tide delivers a chemical burn. (Even with 2 empty loads in a row.) No, I hand wash all my clothes and it takes way longer than if I did my laundry 5 times a week in my house if I had the machines.
- reedlaw 5y ago
  I took it to mean people used to wear clothes longer between washes, not just that we do more frequent, smaller loads. It would be interesting to see a comparison showing how much longer an average person should wear the same clothes in order to make hand washing time commensurate with machine washing time.
  - coding123 5y ago
    Yeah I re-wear the same clothes a LOT and it still takes way more time.
  - charles_f 5y ago
    Agree with that, but then. I have 3 kids and take care of laundry with a wife who wares jeans a maximum of one day in a row (yeah...), it probably takes me between 1 and 2 hours per week, most of it being the folding and sorting. If I were to wash clothes manually, even say, 4 times less, it would still be hugely more time consuming
- imtringued 5y ago
  I don't understand this at all. Doesn't hand washing expose you to more chemicals?
  - coding123 5y ago
    It would except that I use exclusively apple cidar vinegar. not the point.
falsaberN1 5y ago
I find it hard to agree with the article. With the escalation of technology the amount of things I get done every day, like, tangible, countable things, has skyrocketed, even more as my education with that technology went up. Not just programming and admin stuff, that includes stuff like art (cheaper, takes less time, gets nicer results) which some people argued would never ever be a replacement for traditional art (I still do some traditional things but I don't have shelves full of materials anymore). Not to mention new avenues like 3D modeling, I don't need a huge studio and large chunks of rock to create a 3D figure anymore, and there are ways to make it a real sculpture if I wanted. Music composing, I don't need several hundred dollars in instruments anymore (nor a complex soundproof studio). I don't need rooms full of machinery to make code or plan complex network arrangements, etc. And for the things that still need to be done the old way©, there are better tools, information and whatnot. Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and homebrewn programs. Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the third point in the article ("The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt I'm special in any way. It's not like the past had no distractions, and I'd argue distractions in the past were harder to dismiss (having to personally travel to X place to do Y paperwork instead of resolving that with a quick phone call or digital process). Sure, the pandemic made a few disasters in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy turning extremely slow, but I'd blame that more on poor organization than a side effect of technology.
- xondono 5y ago
  > Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and homebrewn programs. Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the third point in the article ("The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt I'm special in any way. It's not like the past had no distractions, and I'd argue distractions in the past were harder to dismiss (having to personally travel to X place to do Y paperwork instead of resolving that with a quick phone call or digital process). This makes you a rare example. I’ve been saying for years that the real computer revolution will happen when people work with computers, rather than on computers. Most of the workforce does the same things they did on paper but on a screen. For example, I’ve seen people fill out spreadsheets manually, with a calculator. A lot of jobs have not seen the speedup of automation, while compliance costs keep growing.
alexgmcm 5y ago
I think people are doing more work than ever, but that doesn't mean the work is useful. Think about how much easier it is to build a SaaS or something vs. even just ten years ago, but that doesn't mean that the new stuff being built will bring economic value. In fact we might expect there to be diminishing returns in terms of what delivers real utility and thus improvements in productivity don't translate to a similar increase in wealth generation.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  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.
  - alexgmcm 5y ago
    “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” – Jeff Hammerbacher
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    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.
    - mewpmewp2 5y ago
      And was what TikTok did positive impact?
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        You don't think bringing people joy is a positive impact?
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
docflabby 5y ago
Speculation and rent seeking are currently being rewarded more than hard work in this phase of the economic cycle, combined with high inflation which is eroding gdp in real terms.
bob33212 5y ago
In 2007 I ran an automated testing team for a product that had 60M in revenue. It was just me by myself. Today you can find startups with less than 5M in revenue with 5 people with the same productivity. Organizations have expanded to fill the budget provided of them mostly through headcount. Similar to Conway's Law.
- chelsea102 5y ago
  This anecdote proves little. Even if taken as representative, there are valid reasons for a differing level of investment, like: - importance of quality to the product domain - differences in talent levels and supply of talent - differences in company stage and expected future revenue growth
boomka 5y ago
the article is a bit weird, I think it refers to productivity paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox But it is a well studied topic, with much more than 5 possible explanations offered for it. I personally think the whole thing is a bit of a nothingburger that comes about as a simple consequence of how we measure productivity, which is via measuring how much money is paid to people. And since monetory / fiscal policy more or less ensures that all the people are always paid something for something, productivity growth is manifested as invention of new service industries, from personal trainers to dietologists. In other words, our productivity metrics mostly measure hours worked. Better metric would be how many hours worked it takes to produce a ton of nickel, or a bushel of corn, or a typical family car. And those number have been going down consistently, suggestive of strong productivity growth and no paradox.
- wussboy 5y ago
  Do you have links or suggestions for stats about “hours worked per bushel of grain etc.”? I’m interested in this area.
  - boomka 5y ago
    something like this: https://sdgdata.gov.uk/2-3-1/ https://sdgdata.gov.uk/2-3-1/ look at the table of labour productivity, it has been growing consistently and has almost tripled between 1973 and today
fhssn1 5y ago
'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (e.g., If 1000 researchers are already working on cancer, increasing the number to 10,000 isn't necessarily going to help find a cure faster). [1] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
- failuser 5y ago
  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 trying to keep or expand the funding. I know that keeping the grad students overworked and hungry keeps many grifters out of science, but at what cost?
  - User23 5y ago
    Cancer really isn’t one disease. It’s thousands if not millions or maybe even billions of diseases that share some similarities. The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero, but there’s plenty of opportunity to help sufferers die with rather than of. It’s a game of incremental improvement so it’s likely that greater investment would produce reasonable returns.
    - reader_mode 5y ago
      >The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero A way to kill a specific type of cells doesn't sound impossible (zero).
      - 5y ago
superkuh 5y ago
The material and capital gains of productivity improvements since the 1970s have gone to mega-corporations and their owners instead of to workers.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Median U.S. income is higher than any other large developed country, including Germany, France, the nordics, etc. More likely is that computers and automation have enabled small numbers of people to have huge impacts. If one person can create a 10% better solution that solution scales infinitely without any supply constraints to the rest of the market, creating a winner take-all effect. Scale of impact is historically why finance and law paid well, and it's also why management gets paid more than ever now. If you as a lawyer are 10% better than your competition and you have automation to make the grunt work un-fuck-up-able, you have much more time to make decisions on many more cases. That means the gains accrue to you instead of being spread among a bunch of mediocre lawyers, whereas previously without computers you might have been limited in how much time you could spend on high value work by communication and physical constraints. In contrast, most workers are performing jobs that are either menial (paper pushing) or automatable, which means there is no way for top performing workers to highly differentiate themselves, since there's no barrier to entry. If you look at software engineers, there is a large gap in skill and business impact between even a Fortune 500 engineer and a FAANG engineer. That gap means 1. ability to highly differentiate yourself, at least to a degree and 2. skilled engineers have huge leverage and impact which translates to higher salaries. When the skill gap ranges from "doesn't understand what a linked list is" to "started a billion dollar company" the income distribution is bound to be heavily bimodal and heavily biased towards the top. It is no coincidence that the advent of automation and software has both caused finance and law salaries to become more bimodal, and created a highly bimodal market for software engineers themselves.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> The Great Dissipation. One of the shocks about entering the world of work was how little I often got done in any given day because I was in a meeting or had to deal with some form or was waiting on permission or many other things. I have had whole days disappear with nothing much to show for them at the end. I am sure I am not the only one. And even though it is almost assuredly known that this happens, nobody seems to care.
- dazc 5y ago
  I had a job once where I did nothing except for when I would find things to do in order to quell the boredom. When I tell people this they are usually envious but I always say 'be careful what you wish for'. For me it was the most miserable period of my life. I've had depression and been homeless - that job was worse.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    Agreed. I once had a job like this - the first so many months was little to no work, because of external inefficiencies. Nice in the beginning - I used the time to learn cool stuff (Emacs, etc). But after a number of months you feel like you were put on this Earth to do something useful, and you start looking for jobs.
- satyrnein 5y ago
  Meanwhile, one of the great shocks that I experienced when becoming a manager was that I had no better solution to keeping a large group of people aligned and unblocked than a bunch of meetings. Sure, I tinkered around the edges a bit, but it's not fundamentally different. Solutions welcome!
  - strictfp 5y ago
    Maintain a backlog for them, at least an idea backlog
  - pas 5y ago
    > a large group of people aligned and unblocked than a bunch of meetings Could you explain this a bit? Why weren't the interested parties talking to each other in smaller groups? Wasn't there a shared base vision? What caused the blocks? What caused the decoherence of alignments? Also, how many meetings? How many people? Thanks!
aranchelk 5y ago
The power of presupposition in questions: we’re all trying to figure out where productivity has gone without questioning if it has in fact gone.
blueblimp 5y ago
> Technology calls our bluff. Improvements in technology show us that technology wasn’t the obstacle that we thought it was. It would make sense that, as technology improves but humans don't, the bottleneck would eventually become the humans. To get around this would require improving the humans (via genetic engineering, for example) or going human-less (via artificial general intelligence, for example).
captainbland 5y ago
Weird article, productivity has increased and is increasing. The real question is whether the result of that productivity is necessarily well harnessed, although that is subjective to a degree. Questions still remain, however, over why so much work is done and yet many of the individuals engaging in that work end up in in-work poverty. That huge amounts of the labour force cannot even afford their own housing. But I digress, I suspect there is a lot of "hidden" productivity that only emerges at the collective level, which is enabled primarily by better communication and transportation, that is not obvious at the individual level.
failuser 5y ago
Does the author really expect for computers to make writing novels by hand way more productive? This is such an edge case and the productivity increase is there (spelling, navigation, version control, there is dedicate software that helps you to make sure your lore and timelines are consistent), but until GPT can make consistent books no technology will help him with the core task: engaging story. In most other areas of human endeavor technology does increase productivity, no bluff there.
jasfi 5y ago
What you do is more important that how quickly you can do it, unless you're very slow and doing the same thing most other people are.
paulpauper 5y ago
The whole falling productivity meme is more of a myth and or overstated. It doesn't mean anything. Look how well the stock market has done over the past decade. No one losing sleep over a .1% reduction in total factor productivity or whatever. What matters more is if technology is advancing, are living standards rising,is the economy growing. The answer seems to be yes for all of those.
- sbelskie 5y ago
  The economy is growing slower as are living standards(at least in the US post 1973 or so) because productivity growth has been slower. Both are obviously advancing, but more slowly.
sys_64738 5y ago
I am constantly distracted by others, by technology interruption products, and by life as I WFH. I have to attend too many zero value meetings which I generally ignore. I have to field questions constantly from people doing busy work then others wonder why I am not more productive. Technology might make process more efficient but the gains are filled with more distractions which prevent progress to providing real value to the widget I'm working on.
ajuc 5y ago
Is this about productivity measured as economists usually define it (so - value added divided by hours worked)? It is a very misleadingly named indicator. If you're a barber working in a small village in a poor country you cut hair for 8 people a day for 3 USD and pay 100 USD a month for renting a place and other costs. So your productivity is 20*24 - 100 = 420 - 100 = 320 USD / 160 hours a month = 2 USD/hour. If you go to a big city in developed country you now take 30 USD per haircut and still do 8 of them a day and pay 1000 USD for rent and other stuff. That results in a productivity of 20 USD/hour. You had become "10x barber" just like that :) It has nothing to do with how well or fast you cut hair or how "productive" or distracted you are. It's all about the price of labor. If that's the productivity we're talking about then the answer is "Great Averaging". Every job that could be moved to low-income countries to lower the costs - is. So the cost of labor goes down. Meanwhile land prices and patents and brands remain in high-income countries. So the relative cost of labor is lowered (or at least its growth is artificially slowed down). For people in low-income countries (like me) the "productivity" goes up, for people in high-income countries it goes down. Great Averaging. A good physical analogy would be 2 containers with water. 1 with hot water and 1 with cold water. When you connect them the water in both changes temperatures in opposite ways. And you can extract work from the temperature difference (that's what the millionaires who do the outsourcing do). It also increases local inequalities (you get rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries), but decreases the inequality globally.
guilhas 5y ago
We are at a time where trust is low. People want something govs and companies want something else. Left and right completely entrenched. While we keep fighting each other we waste a lot of time. Because things are changing to fast, so everyone keeps reinventing the wheel
nixpulvis 5y ago
I'd say there's a Great Desynchronization. Not only are more and more producers simply out to enrich themselves, but social conditions make workers more and more likely to be at each other over topics unrelated to their work. It plays out like destructive interference in phase, where a massive amplitude in effort is taken on all accounts, but the sum is 0.
skohan 5y ago
> The Great Dissipation. Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process, and very little real work gets done. To be honest, I think it might be an inevitability of the productivity boom. Thanks to technology and automation, it's possible for a single individual to accomplish what it might have taken dozens or hundreds of people to do a generation or so ago. When it becomes possible for for a small subset of the population to create enough value to support essentially everyone else, it it just changes the parameters of the social game we are all playing. When essentially all the manpower is needed to progress society, the optimal strategy is to reward the most productive individuals to incentivize others to increase their own productivity. When there's an excess of productivity, the optimal strategy may be to put yourself in a position to capture the value of those few productive individuals. But I think it's also something we can try to address via IP law. Currently we don't do a very good job of incetivizing creating something new. The current state of patent law essentially serves to bully small players out of the market who cannot afford to defend against dubious patent claims. Copyright is used as a cudgel to keep small creators from iterating on culture. In a lot of ways, it's fair to see the game as rigged, and to come to the conclusion that it's not really worth it to create something new. If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the products of their creativity.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process A lot of it just seems to be driven by strange attempts at optimization. For example, at my company, there was a lot of time spent on figuring out developer metrics (for all four of us on the team at its peak) and cost accountability. On the cost accountability side, one thing that has happened three times is that the developers have been idled so the project will not go over budget in time tracking. We were still paid. We were still at work. But to keep an internal budget on track, we were told to drop our tools and sit there.
  - 5y ago
jbverschoor 5y ago
It went to: - distractions - the plethora of (min)information - the lack of proper books, guids and documentation - the twisted fact that everybody needs to be rich and famous - the constant chasing of revenue instead of science, art, philosophy We're living in a fake bubble of bullshit, and everybody wants to be the polished turd.
breck 5y ago
6) We've made laws that greatly restrict our abilities to use these magical new technologies in their most productive ways. Google Books was the canary in the coal mine. Remember when Google was going to organize all the world's information and make it accessible and useful? Then the copyright lobby attacked, and over a decade later that project (which is so obviously a quantum leap in terms of what it could do for human productivity) remains on pause (or permanently abandoned? not sure). People today have access to an endless supply of information noise. If you want quality signal, it's still a trickle. All the best Internet ideas now are not getting built because of copyright law.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  And the problem here is that writing a good book on a thing is something that takes time and effort. Usually enough that it's a full-time or part-time job. While I am no fan of the copyright maximalism that Disney and other corporations employing armies of people doing work-for-hire have turned copyright law into, I am also a person eking out a living as an artist, and I would like to be able to say "please don't use this thing I made to promote viewpoints inimical to my existence, please don't sell copies of this thing I made without asking my permission first and working out licensing terms", and even "please don't reproduce this thing at all without giving me some money". And I would also like to continue to make enough money off of my work for my bills to be paid. I've found that Patreon's enabling me to give a lot of stuff away, but if I wanted to make some of my work a scarce good, that's a choice I'd prefer to be able to enforce in the courts. Or perhaps more succinctly: if you want information to be free, you need to figure out how to free its gatherers, tenders, and creators from worrying about their bills. If you think you have a better idea for freeing information-creators from worrying about their finances than "Kickstarter/Patreon except XXX" or "put ads on all the things", then you might have a project worth chasing.
- pas 5y ago
  > which is so obviously a quantum leap in terms of what it could do for human productivity that's a very strong claim. and it's very likely, unfortunately, false. we have the great classics all available for free in a multitude of formats. a lot of works slowly but surely mature into the public domain each year, yet there's no discernible productivity growth based on the availability of books. also, this sadly goes for research papers too. sure, fuck Elsevier and the whole paper mill industry, but the limiting factor is expertise, tenured spots, academic integrity. (see the replicability crisis in psychology, in particular how the many times the whole scientific enterprise is backwards: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/01/11/one_more_time_o/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/01/11/one_more_t... and https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-h... )
RandomLensman 5y ago
Almost feels like what is meant here is some kind of effectiveness at solving problems and coming up with new "stuff" - not productivity in a classical sense, From my observation there is something to it as most efforts are directed towards efficiency which is much easier to tackle (removing frictions etc.). Effectiveness is often a far less certain endeavor and therefore a tougher sell prior to having the solution.
sologoub 5y ago
> And while moving from Smith Corona 1950 to Word 95 is a big improvement, moving from Word 95 to Word 365 isn’t. This is an interesting and very important point in overall computing today as well - for the vast majority of use cases, many of the todays top patterns are actually not just a small improvement, but are worse. Keyboard shortcuts are usually (not always) faster than mouse/trackpad driven visual pointers. Many of the current UIs are resource hogs that slow things down by a lot. UI patterns have also gotten somewhat less usable - in many cases one cannot easily tell of a surface is clickable in iOS and Android.
IkmoIkmo 5y ago
I'm entirely clueless as to how to measure productivity at scale in a standardised manner. For example, washing machines create a lot of extra leisure, because it makes humans productive. A washing-machine assisted human can was 100x as much clothing in a given minute of operation time. But I have no clue where such a productivity improvement would show up in the data. Of course I can study things like 'how many hours do you spend maintaining your household', and you'd see that dropping decade after decade, despite living in ever larger homes with more functionality (and thus, a larger 'maintenance load'). That's productivity, and stand-alone it can be analysed and concluded as such. But fitting that into the same productivity data as say, the construction of homes per worker in an elegant way? I don't know how you would do that. Nor do I know how you account for completely different units across time and sectors. For example, how do we measure productivity of the pharmaceutical industry? Patents per person? Medicines launched? Number of lives saved by vaccines? A GDP per worked hour is of course a great start. But it leaves a lot out, too. For example, technology that sequences a genome for a penny in a short timespan may indirectly lead to gdp growth, perhaps, but in and of itself that massive cheap boost to a researchers' insight into a genome will not show up as a direct boost to GDP, in fact the opposite. Curious to understand from economists how such challenges are typically handled and what the data says.
jollybean 5y ago
? Productivity is to a great extent a measure of producer surplus. If you can sell something at a higher prices, often that leads to 'greater productivity' when really it isn't. So if consumers have more buying power, and we make the same amount and quality of stuff, but sell at lower prices, consumers are getting a better surplus i.e. 'consumer profit' ... then that's where productivity can 'disappear' to. Literally higher standard of living. If we measured in some objective price - or - we just measured in terms of 'quality of things produced' we'd see that better.
forcry 5y ago
It is quite simple. To distractions. Look at me. I could be doing something useful. Instead I am talking to people about inconsequent things in hackernews.. And man, a day just disappear, just like that...
Ericson2314 5y ago
This sort of questioning inextricably leads to (post-) Keynesianism / demand-side thinking. Do get there!
pontifier 5y ago
Red tape has essentially destroyed the last year and a half of my life.
ximm 5y ago
> The Great Dissipation We should stop reinventing the concept of "efficiency gains can be decreased or even nullified by psychological effects" and instead agree on a term for it. So far I found: - Rebound Effect - Jevons paradox - Le Chatelier's principle - SnackWell effect - Induced demand - Parkinson's law - Risk compensation I bet there are many more applications to specific domains.
ageofwant 5y ago
For me it has gone into being 'Agile'. 'Agile' has been the largest single worse thing to happen to software development in my experience. It may be appropriate for small shops fighting for their lives, but as a 'waterfall' replacement it has no discernable productivity benefits. It just seems to generate a lot of working the work.
2ion 5y ago
The Great Incompetence: Factor productivity increases only if the factor (=new technology) can be fully applied. A better factor can even decrease productivity if less of it applies than from the previous factor (=old technology). I'd say that most people make neither the fullest nor any reasonable use of technology, especially information technology as far as the office and standard company processes are concerned. Either they can't, or simply won't, either by their own volition or by instruction.
legulere 5y ago
The west has a productivity stagnation because it’s concentrating on services instead of industry. The productivity of services grows much slower that that of industry.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  Amusingly we outsourced the sector of the economy with high productivity gains while keeping the part subject to Baumol's cost disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

236 points by wellpast 5y ago

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 low hanging fruit to pick. These low hanging fruit can be picked by throwing more people at the problem (increasing workforce participation or working longer hours). One example is how much more time it takes to build infrastructure in America vs China. If you look at the data[0], productivity in both countries is growing at roughly the same rate. It pretty much invalidates the assertion in the blog and the source tweet. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?country=USA~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

fidesomnes 5y ago
As much as I dislike Chinas ruling party, their government is a model of efficiency when compared to the USA and it mostly gets out of peoples way. Contrast that with US government where taxes, vehicle registration, and judicial process is perhaps decades behind despite having more resources. There is something about complacency common to all democracies that never up well. The old refrain "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time" applies just as much today.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> These low hanging fruit can be picked by throwing more people at the problem (increasing workforce participation or working longer hours). I haven't read the article yet, but note increasing workforce participation or working hours doesn't increase productivity - that just increases the denominator for the productivity calculation, and unless it increases the numerator faster there is no productivity increase.
- robjan 5y ago
  This is why I said "not necessarily efficiently". At a very macro level, you can increase economic output by either working more or increasing efficiency (productivity per hour).
alexgmcm 5y ago
I think the tweet linked to by OP is using the colloquial definition of productivity (i.e. I can get more stuff done) and uses examples of computer technology etc. This isn't to be confused with the economic definition of GDP per hour worked - which has far more to do with the sectors of industry that a country has. After all, a few financiers doing million-dollar deals is always going to generate more GDP per hour than coltan miners, even though it's not obvious which is actually generating more wealth. Robert F Kennedy famously said the GNP "measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile".
- failuser 5y ago
  You increase what you optimize for. GDP increase is the stated goal of most current societies and they work to achieve it.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
GDP doesn't take into consideration public debt. If public debt is up 100% and GDP has barely changed - I don't think that's cause for celebration that GDP / hours worked = we are more productive. I'm not saying this is the case. But people use GDP a lot to make points like this - and it's important to talk about how much public debt is increasing GDP.
- skywal_l 5y ago
  If you are in a country where pensions are managed by the state, your contributions are considered taxes. If you are in a country with a private pension system, your contributions are in the GDP! The GDP is not a scientific measure. It is an ideological concept. It doesn't mean it is useless, but it should not be taken at face value.
  - karatinversion 5y ago
    Taxed income isn’t subtracted from income in national accounts though...?
lkrubner 5y ago
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 so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to productivity? See: The Solow Productivity Paradox: What Do Computers Do to Productivity? https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-paradox-what-do-computers-do-to-productivity/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-solow-productivity-pa... McKinsey wrote this in 2018, predicting a productivity boom was coming soon, though of course this prediction has been made often since 1973, and the only time it was even slightly true was during the boom in big box retail 1995-2005: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/is-the-solow-paradox-back# https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital... It's well known that in the 1800s the telegraph and then the telephone allowed a large scale re-organization of capital, and capital invested heavily to take advantage of the new technologies, but it was impossible to see a productivity benefit. These technologies allowed new systems of control, but not necessarily any productivity benefit. Since 1970 computer network technologies have offered a similar reorganization, but they are vastly more powerful than the telephone, and they allowed a re-organization that was vastly more profound than any previous reorganization of capital. Millions of jobs were outsourced to India, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and then Brazil, Russia, Romania, etc.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  > But, as a separate issue, the above essay is focused on computers, and so it implicitly raises the Solow Productivity Paradox: why don't computers seem to add anything to productivity? Just going by eye, there is a pretty sharp trend upward from about 1990-2005, which I think roughly corresponds to the period when the bulk of computerization happened in homes, offices, schools, as well as being put to use in many of the most important embedded applications -- factories and machinery, automobiles, etc. Eyeballing the trend before 1990 has it continuing to low-$50s, instead it's mid-$60s, a 20% increase. So why do you think this graph shows computers don't seem to add anything to productivity? I'm not saying they have, but I can't see how that graph demonstrates they haven't.
coldtea 5y ago
>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?".
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  It might be that we're spending the increased productivity on temporary things rather than long-lived things. For example, spending $1M on keeping a retired cancer patient alive. That's good for them, good for their family, good for lots of people to feel like they'll have a chance of survival if they get it, but it doesn't cause a new bridge to be built, etc. The technology improves, the knowledge improves, but those things aren't visible on a skyline. It might also be things like higher quality food, varieties of food, yachts for the rich that most of us don't ever see, or things like that, things that are either consumed and don't accumulate wealth, or things that are relatively long lived and durable but not part of most people's lives because most of the gains have gone to the top 1%. Other ideas: paper pushing services like handling unnecessarily large volumes of litigation just to run a business, which requires work and causes GDP to go up but doesn't produce actual products.
- IkmoIkmo 5y ago
  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 their home didn't have a bath nor hot water. Everyone used to wear hand-me-downs. We used to send cassette tapes to family abroad because international calls were so expensive. We flew every few years instead of multiple times a year. We saved up for CDs, and I literally never, ever went out for dinner to a restaurant (outside of a rare holiday) with my parents. My dad lost both parents as a child to old age, my grandfather worked 6, sometimes 7 days a week, my grandmother spent almost the entire day running the household (e.g. washing clothes by hand), they had no retirement and lived like that till death. I'm often surprised about this idea we've got it worse off. The conversations usually revolve around housing, healthcare and college having become drastically more expensive. (although, never normalised for interest rates that dropped from 15% to 3%, homes that average 2x larger than 60 years ago with fewer people, life expectancy increasing by a decade since 1950 etc etc). Life isn't better in all respects, but on the whole I certainly wouldn't want to trade with past generations. And a lot of that boils down to productivity allowing new measures of wealth for many. If we look at it on a worldwide scale, the difference is much, much more pronounced. Many lower income countries saw massive productivity improvements. We shouldn't forget that the past 3-4 decades have been all about globalising markets. Factory workers in the US now compete with those in China. IT staff the UK is competing with IT staff in India. Technology is relatively mobile and goes across borders easily. You cannot measure ceteris paribus productivity improvements in terms of gdp per capita in the west without correcting for increased competition abroad (e.g. in China). And in doing so, you will find that there's even bigger productivity increases in lower/middle income countries, too.
babesh 5y ago
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-hour-pennworldtable?stackMode=relative&country=USA~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho... Are you sure about that? Are you measuring in absolute GDP per person or rate of growth per person?

egypturnash 5y ago

The Great Disparity In Income surely has nothing to do with it. If the boss is making absurd multipliers of your income and barely paying you enough to get by, the last thing you wanna do is get your work done as fast as possible. Pad those hours, give yourself the raise the boss never will. Take stuff from work.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rdiddly 5y ago
Acknowledging receipt of the King Missile reference!
- egypturnash 5y ago
  <3

sudeepj 5y ago

Productivity compared to which time in the past? If we compare productivity today compared to say 1960/1950 then we have definitely improved. We can manufacture at speed & scale. We can communicate with people across the continents like never before. We can work-from-home to a large extent than ever before. We can destroy each other at much grander scale like never before. But like any system, any improvement in efficiency results in shifting the bottlenecks. It never truly goes away. The nature of the bottleneck may be different but its there. The things like "forms, compliance, process" are the new bottlenecks. Technology is a means to an end. It cannot be the end itself (at a macro level). Tech is by humans, for humans and of humans. Humans will always be the centerpiece for time to come (unless AI becomes so good as they potray in sci-fi films/tv-series).

coding123 5y ago

> This is what happened with the introduction of household appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for example, we do laundry more often. I have thoroughly debunked this commonly referenced saying. I don't have a washer and a dryer any more and I can't go into laundromats because Tide delivers a chemical burn. (Even with 2 empty loads in a row.) No, I hand wash all my clothes and it takes way longer than if I did my laundry 5 times a week in my house if I had the machines.

reedlaw 5y ago
I took it to mean people used to wear clothes longer between washes, not just that we do more frequent, smaller loads. It would be interesting to see a comparison showing how much longer an average person should wear the same clothes in order to make hand washing time commensurate with machine washing time.
- coding123 5y ago
  Yeah I re-wear the same clothes a LOT and it still takes way more time.
- charles_f 5y ago
  Agree with that, but then. I have 3 kids and take care of laundry with a wife who wares jeans a maximum of one day in a row (yeah...), it probably takes me between 1 and 2 hours per week, most of it being the folding and sorting. If I were to wash clothes manually, even say, 4 times less, it would still be hugely more time consuming
imtringued 5y ago
I don't understand this at all. Doesn't hand washing expose you to more chemicals?
- coding123 5y ago
  It would except that I use exclusively apple cidar vinegar. not the point.

falsaberN1 5y ago

I find it hard to agree with the article. With the escalation of technology the amount of things I get done every day, like, tangible, countable things, has skyrocketed, even more as my education with that technology went up. Not just programming and admin stuff, that includes stuff like art (cheaper, takes less time, gets nicer results) which some people argued would never ever be a replacement for traditional art (I still do some traditional things but I don't have shelves full of materials anymore). Not to mention new avenues like 3D modeling, I don't need a huge studio and large chunks of rock to create a 3D figure anymore, and there are ways to make it a real sculpture if I wanted. Music composing, I don't need several hundred dollars in instruments anymore (nor a complex soundproof studio). I don't need rooms full of machinery to make code or plan complex network arrangements, etc. And for the things that still need to be done the old way©, there are better tools, information and whatnot. Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and homebrewn programs. Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the third point in the article ("The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt I'm special in any way. It's not like the past had no distractions, and I'd argue distractions in the past were harder to dismiss (having to personally travel to X place to do Y paperwork instead of resolving that with a quick phone call or digital process). Sure, the pandemic made a few disasters in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy turning extremely slow, but I'd blame that more on poor organization than a side effect of technology.

xondono 5y ago
> Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and homebrewn programs. Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the third point in the article ("The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt I'm special in any way. It's not like the past had no distractions, and I'd argue distractions in the past were harder to dismiss (having to personally travel to X place to do Y paperwork instead of resolving that with a quick phone call or digital process). This makes you a rare example. I’ve been saying for years that the real computer revolution will happen when people work with computers, rather than on computers. Most of the workforce does the same things they did on paper but on a screen. For example, I’ve seen people fill out spreadsheets manually, with a calculator. A lot of jobs have not seen the speedup of automation, while compliance costs keep growing.

alexgmcm 5y ago

I think people are doing more work than ever, but that doesn't mean the work is useful. Think about how much easier it is to build a SaaS or something vs. even just ten years ago, but that doesn't mean that the new stuff being built will bring economic value. In fact we might expect there to be diminishing returns in terms of what delivers real utility and thus improvements in productivity don't translate to a similar increase in wealth generation.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
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.
- alexgmcm 5y ago
  “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” – Jeff Hammerbacher
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  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.
  - mewpmewp2 5y ago
    And was what TikTok did positive impact?
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      You don't think bringing people joy is a positive impact?
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago

docflabby 5y ago

Speculation and rent seeking are currently being rewarded more than hard work in this phase of the economic cycle, combined with high inflation which is eroding gdp in real terms.

bob33212 5y ago

In 2007 I ran an automated testing team for a product that had 60M in revenue. It was just me by myself. Today you can find startups with less than 5M in revenue with 5 people with the same productivity. Organizations have expanded to fill the budget provided of them mostly through headcount. Similar to Conway's Law.

chelsea102 5y ago
This anecdote proves little. Even if taken as representative, there are valid reasons for a differing level of investment, like: - importance of quality to the product domain - differences in talent levels and supply of talent - differences in company stage and expected future revenue growth

boomka 5y ago

the article is a bit weird, I think it refers to productivity paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox But it is a well studied topic, with much more than 5 possible explanations offered for it. I personally think the whole thing is a bit of a nothingburger that comes about as a simple consequence of how we measure productivity, which is via measuring how much money is paid to people. And since monetory / fiscal policy more or less ensures that all the people are always paid something for something, productivity growth is manifested as invention of new service industries, from personal trainers to dietologists. In other words, our productivity metrics mostly measure hours worked. Better metric would be how many hours worked it takes to produce a ton of nickel, or a bushel of corn, or a typical family car. And those number have been going down consistently, suggestive of strong productivity growth and no paradox.

wussboy 5y ago
Do you have links or suggestions for stats about “hours worked per bushel of grain etc.”? I’m interested in this area.
- boomka 5y ago
  something like this: https://sdgdata.gov.uk/2-3-1/ https://sdgdata.gov.uk/2-3-1/ look at the table of labour productivity, it has been growing consistently and has almost tripled between 1973 and today

fhssn1 5y ago

'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (e.g., If 1000 researchers are already working on cancer, increasing the number to 10,000 isn't necessarily going to help find a cure faster). [1] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

failuser 5y ago
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 trying to keep or expand the funding. I know that keeping the grad students overworked and hungry keeps many grifters out of science, but at what cost?
- User23 5y ago
  Cancer really isn’t one disease. It’s thousands if not millions or maybe even billions of diseases that share some similarities. The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero, but there’s plenty of opportunity to help sufferers die with rather than of. It’s a game of incremental improvement so it’s likely that greater investment would produce reasonable returns.
  - reader_mode 5y ago
    >The odds of a silver bullet cure are effectively zero A way to kill a specific type of cells doesn't sound impossible (zero).
    - 5y ago

superkuh 5y ago

The material and capital gains of productivity improvements since the 1970s have gone to mega-corporations and their owners instead of to workers.

b9a2cab5 5y ago
Median U.S. income is higher than any other large developed country, including Germany, France, the nordics, etc. More likely is that computers and automation have enabled small numbers of people to have huge impacts. If one person can create a 10% better solution that solution scales infinitely without any supply constraints to the rest of the market, creating a winner take-all effect. Scale of impact is historically why finance and law paid well, and it's also why management gets paid more than ever now. If you as a lawyer are 10% better than your competition and you have automation to make the grunt work un-fuck-up-able, you have much more time to make decisions on many more cases. That means the gains accrue to you instead of being spread among a bunch of mediocre lawyers, whereas previously without computers you might have been limited in how much time you could spend on high value work by communication and physical constraints. In contrast, most workers are performing jobs that are either menial (paper pushing) or automatable, which means there is no way for top performing workers to highly differentiate themselves, since there's no barrier to entry. If you look at software engineers, there is a large gap in skill and business impact between even a Fortune 500 engineer and a FAANG engineer. That gap means 1. ability to highly differentiate yourself, at least to a degree and 2. skilled engineers have huge leverage and impact which translates to higher salaries. When the skill gap ranges from "doesn't understand what a linked list is" to "started a billion dollar company" the income distribution is bound to be heavily bimodal and heavily biased towards the top. It is no coincidence that the advent of automation and software has both caused finance and law salaries to become more bimodal, and created a highly bimodal market for software engineers themselves.

MattGaiser 5y ago

> The Great Dissipation. One of the shocks about entering the world of work was how little I often got done in any given day because I was in a meeting or had to deal with some form or was waiting on permission or many other things. I have had whole days disappear with nothing much to show for them at the end. I am sure I am not the only one. And even though it is almost assuredly known that this happens, nobody seems to care.

dazc 5y ago
I had a job once where I did nothing except for when I would find things to do in order to quell the boredom. When I tell people this they are usually envious but I always say 'be careful what you wish for'. For me it was the most miserable period of my life. I've had depression and been homeless - that job was worse.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Agreed. I once had a job like this - the first so many months was little to no work, because of external inefficiencies. Nice in the beginning - I used the time to learn cool stuff (Emacs, etc). But after a number of months you feel like you were put on this Earth to do something useful, and you start looking for jobs.
satyrnein 5y ago
Meanwhile, one of the great shocks that I experienced when becoming a manager was that I had no better solution to keeping a large group of people aligned and unblocked than a bunch of meetings. Sure, I tinkered around the edges a bit, but it's not fundamentally different. Solutions welcome!
- strictfp 5y ago
  Maintain a backlog for them, at least an idea backlog
- pas 5y ago
  > a large group of people aligned and unblocked than a bunch of meetings Could you explain this a bit? Why weren't the interested parties talking to each other in smaller groups? Wasn't there a shared base vision? What caused the blocks? What caused the decoherence of alignments? Also, how many meetings? How many people? Thanks!

aranchelk 5y ago

The power of presupposition in questions: we’re all trying to figure out where productivity has gone without questioning if it has in fact gone.

blueblimp 5y ago

> Technology calls our bluff. Improvements in technology show us that technology wasn’t the obstacle that we thought it was. It would make sense that, as technology improves but humans don't, the bottleneck would eventually become the humans. To get around this would require improving the humans (via genetic engineering, for example) or going human-less (via artificial general intelligence, for example).

captainbland 5y ago

Weird article, productivity has increased and is increasing. The real question is whether the result of that productivity is necessarily well harnessed, although that is subjective to a degree. Questions still remain, however, over why so much work is done and yet many of the individuals engaging in that work end up in in-work poverty. That huge amounts of the labour force cannot even afford their own housing. But I digress, I suspect there is a lot of "hidden" productivity that only emerges at the collective level, which is enabled primarily by better communication and transportation, that is not obvious at the individual level.

failuser 5y ago

Does the author really expect for computers to make writing novels by hand way more productive? This is such an edge case and the productivity increase is there (spelling, navigation, version control, there is dedicate software that helps you to make sure your lore and timelines are consistent), but until GPT can make consistent books no technology will help him with the core task: engaging story. In most other areas of human endeavor technology does increase productivity, no bluff there.

jasfi 5y ago

What you do is more important that how quickly you can do it, unless you're very slow and doing the same thing most other people are.

paulpauper 5y ago

The whole falling productivity meme is more of a myth and or overstated. It doesn't mean anything. Look how well the stock market has done over the past decade. No one losing sleep over a .1% reduction in total factor productivity or whatever. What matters more is if technology is advancing, are living standards rising,is the economy growing. The answer seems to be yes for all of those.

sbelskie 5y ago
The economy is growing slower as are living standards(at least in the US post 1973 or so) because productivity growth has been slower. Both are obviously advancing, but more slowly.

sys_64738 5y ago

I am constantly distracted by others, by technology interruption products, and by life as I WFH. I have to attend too many zero value meetings which I generally ignore. I have to field questions constantly from people doing busy work then others wonder why I am not more productive. Technology might make process more efficient but the gains are filled with more distractions which prevent progress to providing real value to the widget I'm working on.

ajuc 5y ago

Is this about productivity measured as economists usually define it (so - value added divided by hours worked)? It is a very misleadingly named indicator. If you're a barber working in a small village in a poor country you cut hair for 8 people a day for 3 USD and pay 100 USD a month for renting a place and other costs. So your productivity is 20*24 - 100 = 420 - 100 = 320 USD / 160 hours a month = 2 USD/hour. If you go to a big city in developed country you now take 30 USD per haircut and still do 8 of them a day and pay 1000 USD for rent and other stuff. That results in a productivity of 20 USD/hour. You had become "10x barber" just like that :) It has nothing to do with how well or fast you cut hair or how "productive" or distracted you are. It's all about the price of labor. If that's the productivity we're talking about then the answer is "Great Averaging". Every job that could be moved to low-income countries to lower the costs - is. So the cost of labor goes down. Meanwhile land prices and patents and brands remain in high-income countries. So the relative cost of labor is lowered (or at least its growth is artificially slowed down). For people in low-income countries (like me) the "productivity" goes up, for people in high-income countries it goes down. Great Averaging. A good physical analogy would be 2 containers with water. 1 with hot water and 1 with cold water. When you connect them the water in both changes temperatures in opposite ways. And you can extract work from the temperature difference (that's what the millionaires who do the outsourcing do). It also increases local inequalities (you get rich people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries), but decreases the inequality globally.

guilhas 5y ago

We are at a time where trust is low. People want something govs and companies want something else. Left and right completely entrenched. While we keep fighting each other we waste a lot of time. Because things are changing to fast, so everyone keeps reinventing the wheel

nixpulvis 5y ago

I'd say there's a Great Desynchronization. Not only are more and more producers simply out to enrich themselves, but social conditions make workers more and more likely to be at each other over topics unrelated to their work. It plays out like destructive interference in phase, where a massive amplitude in effort is taken on all accounts, but the sum is 0.

skohan 5y ago

> The Great Dissipation. Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process, and very little real work gets done. To be honest, I think it might be an inevitability of the productivity boom. Thanks to technology and automation, it's possible for a single individual to accomplish what it might have taken dozens or hundreds of people to do a generation or so ago. When it becomes possible for for a small subset of the population to create enough value to support essentially everyone else, it it just changes the parameters of the social game we are all playing. When essentially all the manpower is needed to progress society, the optimal strategy is to reward the most productive individuals to incentivize others to increase their own productivity. When there's an excess of productivity, the optimal strategy may be to put yourself in a position to capture the value of those few productive individuals. But I think it's also something we can try to address via IP law. Currently we don't do a very good job of incetivizing creating something new. The current state of patent law essentially serves to bully small players out of the market who cannot afford to defend against dubious patent claims. Copyright is used as a cudgel to keep small creators from iterating on culture. In a lot of ways, it's fair to see the game as rigged, and to come to the conclusion that it's not really worth it to create something new. If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the products of their creativity.

MattGaiser 5y ago
> this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process A lot of it just seems to be driven by strange attempts at optimization. For example, at my company, there was a lot of time spent on figuring out developer metrics (for all four of us on the team at its peak) and cost accountability. On the cost accountability side, one thing that has happened three times is that the developers have been idled so the project will not go over budget in time tracking. We were still paid. We were still at work. But to keep an internal budget on track, we were told to drop our tools and sit there.
- 5y ago

jbverschoor 5y ago

It went to: - distractions - the plethora of (min)information - the lack of proper books, guids and documentation - the twisted fact that everybody needs to be rich and famous - the constant chasing of revenue instead of science, art, philosophy We're living in a fake bubble of bullshit, and everybody wants to be the polished turd.

breck 5y ago

6) We've made laws that greatly restrict our abilities to use these magical new technologies in their most productive ways. Google Books was the canary in the coal mine. Remember when Google was going to organize all the world's information and make it accessible and useful? Then the copyright lobby attacked, and over a decade later that project (which is so obviously a quantum leap in terms of what it could do for human productivity) remains on pause (or permanently abandoned? not sure). People today have access to an endless supply of information noise. If you want quality signal, it's still a trickle. All the best Internet ideas now are not getting built because of copyright law.

egypturnash 5y ago
And the problem here is that writing a good book on a thing is something that takes time and effort. Usually enough that it's a full-time or part-time job. While I am no fan of the copyright maximalism that Disney and other corporations employing armies of people doing work-for-hire have turned copyright law into, I am also a person eking out a living as an artist, and I would like to be able to say "please don't use this thing I made to promote viewpoints inimical to my existence, please don't sell copies of this thing I made without asking my permission first and working out licensing terms", and even "please don't reproduce this thing at all without giving me some money". And I would also like to continue to make enough money off of my work for my bills to be paid. I've found that Patreon's enabling me to give a lot of stuff away, but if I wanted to make some of my work a scarce good, that's a choice I'd prefer to be able to enforce in the courts. Or perhaps more succinctly: if you want information to be free, you need to figure out how to free its gatherers, tenders, and creators from worrying about their bills. If you think you have a better idea for freeing information-creators from worrying about their finances than "Kickstarter/Patreon except XXX" or "put ads on all the things", then you might have a project worth chasing.
pas 5y ago
> which is so obviously a quantum leap in terms of what it could do for human productivity that's a very strong claim. and it's very likely, unfortunately, false. we have the great classics all available for free in a multitude of formats. a lot of works slowly but surely mature into the public domain each year, yet there's no discernible productivity growth based on the availability of books. also, this sadly goes for research papers too. sure, fuck Elsevier and the whole paper mill industry, but the limiting factor is expertise, tenured spots, academic integrity. (see the replicability crisis in psychology, in particular how the many times the whole scientific enterprise is backwards: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/01/11/one_more_time_o/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2011/01/11/one_more_t... and https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-h... )

RandomLensman 5y ago

Almost feels like what is meant here is some kind of effectiveness at solving problems and coming up with new "stuff" - not productivity in a classical sense, From my observation there is something to it as most efforts are directed towards efficiency which is much easier to tackle (removing frictions etc.). Effectiveness is often a far less certain endeavor and therefore a tougher sell prior to having the solution.

sologoub 5y ago

> And while moving from Smith Corona 1950 to Word 95 is a big improvement, moving from Word 95 to Word 365 isn’t. This is an interesting and very important point in overall computing today as well - for the vast majority of use cases, many of the todays top patterns are actually not just a small improvement, but are worse. Keyboard shortcuts are usually (not always) faster than mouse/trackpad driven visual pointers. Many of the current UIs are resource hogs that slow things down by a lot. UI patterns have also gotten somewhat less usable - in many cases one cannot easily tell of a surface is clickable in iOS and Android.

IkmoIkmo 5y ago

I'm entirely clueless as to how to measure productivity at scale in a standardised manner. For example, washing machines create a lot of extra leisure, because it makes humans productive. A washing-machine assisted human can was 100x as much clothing in a given minute of operation time. But I have no clue where such a productivity improvement would show up in the data. Of course I can study things like 'how many hours do you spend maintaining your household', and you'd see that dropping decade after decade, despite living in ever larger homes with more functionality (and thus, a larger 'maintenance load'). That's productivity, and stand-alone it can be analysed and concluded as such. But fitting that into the same productivity data as say, the construction of homes per worker in an elegant way? I don't know how you would do that. Nor do I know how you account for completely different units across time and sectors. For example, how do we measure productivity of the pharmaceutical industry? Patents per person? Medicines launched? Number of lives saved by vaccines? A GDP per worked hour is of course a great start. But it leaves a lot out, too. For example, technology that sequences a genome for a penny in a short timespan may indirectly lead to gdp growth, perhaps, but in and of itself that massive cheap boost to a researchers' insight into a genome will not show up as a direct boost to GDP, in fact the opposite. Curious to understand from economists how such challenges are typically handled and what the data says.

jollybean 5y ago

? Productivity is to a great extent a measure of producer surplus. If you can sell something at a higher prices, often that leads to 'greater productivity' when really it isn't. So if consumers have more buying power, and we make the same amount and quality of stuff, but sell at lower prices, consumers are getting a better surplus i.e. 'consumer profit' ... then that's where productivity can 'disappear' to. Literally higher standard of living. If we measured in some objective price - or - we just measured in terms of 'quality of things produced' we'd see that better.

forcry 5y ago

It is quite simple. To distractions. Look at me. I could be doing something useful. Instead I am talking to people about inconsequent things in hackernews.. And man, a day just disappear, just like that...

Ericson2314 5y ago

This sort of questioning inextricably leads to (post-) Keynesianism / demand-side thinking. Do get there!

pontifier 5y ago

Red tape has essentially destroyed the last year and a half of my life.

ximm 5y ago

> The Great Dissipation We should stop reinventing the concept of "efficiency gains can be decreased or even nullified by psychological effects" and instead agree on a term for it. So far I found: - Rebound Effect - Jevons paradox - Le Chatelier's principle - SnackWell effect - Induced demand - Parkinson's law - Risk compensation I bet there are many more applications to specific domains.

ageofwant 5y ago

For me it has gone into being 'Agile'. 'Agile' has been the largest single worse thing to happen to software development in my experience. It may be appropriate for small shops fighting for their lives, but as a 'waterfall' replacement it has no discernable productivity benefits. It just seems to generate a lot of working the work.

2ion 5y ago

The Great Incompetence: Factor productivity increases only if the factor (=new technology) can be fully applied. A better factor can even decrease productivity if less of it applies than from the previous factor (=old technology). I'd say that most people make neither the fullest nor any reasonable use of technology, especially information technology as far as the office and standard company processes are concerned. Either they can't, or simply won't, either by their own volition or by instruction.

legulere 5y ago

The west has a productivity stagnation because it’s concentrating on services instead of industry. The productivity of services grows much slower that that of industry.

Gibbon1 5y ago
Amusingly we outsourced the sector of the economy with high productivity gains while keeping the part subject to Baumol's cost disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease