13 ms·

The Future Is Getting Farther Away

93 points by eitau_1 5y ago

ChuckMcM 5y ago
I found the comment that linked the article where that graph appeared (https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/a-big-fiscal-push-is-urgent-the-risk-of-overheating-is-small https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/a-big-fiscal...) to be a much more informative and useful reference.
- mcguire 5y ago
  As that article points out, the real response to that graph is, "Good lord, what happened in 2008-2009?!"
jchw 5y ago
I’m trying to figure out how productivity rates could possibly be construed as the only important metric for what constitutes “the future.” Doesn’t that sound like a paperclip maximizer kind of perspective? Am I missing something?
- ksdale 5y ago
  Productivity is basically a measure of how much stuff we get per person. Obviously stuff isn't the only thing that matters, but once upon a time, everyone had to spend all of their time growing food. Now farming is 1,000 times more productive, and most everyone can do something else. The same with making clothes, furniture, etc. If we want a world where everyone can spend all of their time doing whatever they want and have enough, we're going to need a much more productive world.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    Productivity also drives inequality. It’s at least a double edged sword.
    - ksdale 5y ago
      Are you suggesting it would be better if everyone were poor instead of just some people?
      - closeparen 5y ago
        Poverty is relative to your contemporaries. What does it mean to be poor in a developed country today? Flush toilets, a thermostat, a cell phone, probably even a car. A thousand calories from McDonalds for half an hour's labor. You'd be the envy of world history. Yet you're very obviously poor, because of the even better stuff that other people have. In the same way, the invention and adoption of all those things created a condition of poverty in the previously normal people who didn’t have them.
        ksdale 5y ago
        So that's a yes?
        closeparen 5y ago
        Good for material conditions, bad for social conditions. How you balance those is your political alignment.
      - ddingus 5y ago
        There is another measure of wealth and that is time. Wealthy people purpose the majority of their time themselves. Poor people have most of their time purposed for them. When viewed this way, we see poverty is rampant here, even though many people have the various baubles and trinkets our modern society can produce.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      Productivity decreases demand for full time employment. Desiring full time employment is the double edged sword. The robots do the work for you but you still want to work and you want to do the "productive" part.
    - 5y ago
  - jchw 5y ago
    There is an obvious gain when agriculture gets 1000x more productive, but there has to be a point where it becomes diminishing returns. How many more times will making agriculture 10x more productive noticeably improve people’s lives? At some point productivity has to stop being the only metric. I have a feeling productivity gains have already hit that point and the primary benefactor to further improvement is the producers.
    - mgraczyk 5y ago
      Based on food prices and the % of world income spent on food amongst the lowest income quartiles, another 10x or 100x would noticeably improve the lives of a large number of people. Part of this is an uneven global distribution of productivity gains, but even in developed countries there is plenty of room for innovation to stabilize prices and prevent shocks. For a comparison across countries, see figure 6 in https://www.fb.org/market-intel/u.s.-food-expenditures-at-home-and-abroad https://www.fb.org/market-intel/u.s.-food-expenditures-at-ho...
    - ksdale 5y ago
      We're very privileged to be able to wonder when enough productivity is enough. A huge portion of the world's population still lives in abject poverty and increased productivity would absolutely benefit them. And I think there were people 100 years ago making the same argument as you, that technology had advanced far enough that there was no need for more. FWIW, I agree that the focus on productivity at the exclusion of everything else is bad, the point of productivity is to live well, but I think there's a lot of the world that doesn't live well, and I think it is perhaps a failure of imagination to not believe that we could live better as well.
      - jchw 5y ago
        I find it rather ridiculous to view the inequities of society as a problem that should be solved by increasing productivity. I absolutely have a feeling that some of our biggest productivity gains have come on the backs of and sometimes maybe at the cost of worse quality of life in some parts of the world. Extremely cheap labor improves productivity numbers.
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  For much of the 20th century, everybody from Bertrand Russell to the writers of the Jetsons seemed to think that accelerating productivity would allow everybody to work proportionally less. The owner class disagreed, and high productivity just meant higher profits because many more (increasingly lower quality) widgits are made per worker-hour. But just look at that GDP!!
  - vorpalhex 5y ago
    That's fundamentally wrong. You are not living a 20th century lifestyle. You don't sit in a mostly wooden building with minimal electricity or gas lighting with reading and radio as your primary entertainment. At the very least you now have a computer that was certainly manufactured and assembled on the other half of the globe and transported to you. You likely have a lot of electrical appliances like ovens, a fridge, AC, and hot water. You likely don't live 3 or 4 generations to a 1000sq ft house. That we work the same in general has more to do with (imo positive) lifestyle inflation than some evil banker sitting on their slightly larger boat than the one you own.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      My computer costs less than a small lathe and the computer does more than the lathe.
      - vorpalhex 5y ago
        A small lathe is about $250 so unless you are using a Pi or Pinebook, that is unlikely. Your computer does _different_ stuff than a lathe. We need both computers and lathes in modern life.
    - revolvingocelot 5y ago
      What's fundamentally wrong? None of this has anything to do with greater productivity... It's not as though larger houses require a linear increase in construction workers; computers do not grow in vast fields necessitating hundreds of farm-hands. It's quite the opposite. GDP, which is what we were talking about, can rise forever because those who benefit will find ways to make it rise. Like, say, coupling difficult-to-access healthcare to it! Hey, now healthcare is a full fourth of it! Selling real estate and insurance to one another helps it increase, too! Line go up!! Something tells me that greater productivity allowed this cool and normal situation of proliferating middlemen to occur. The existence of relatively inexpensive ovens, etc, has been the case since easily 1970, which is around when productivity started to decouple from benefits to citizenry. I assume you're assured of this perspective because the existence of your boat makes you uncomfortable with the idea that we're using the insane productivity gains our species has realized to be gainfully employed not doing anything material or beneficial, but rather tricking people into clicking on ads. I understand whose shoulders I stand on, and I also understand that we don't really have to have the underpaid underclass to whom the ads are shown, we've just decided this way is better.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Don't get hung up on "If total factor productivity". https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/33080/dimensional-analysis-of-gdp https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/33080/dimensio... sort of clears some stuff up. Economists are not that good at dimensional analysis, despite their worship of physicists, and every physicist knowing dimensional analysis is key to staying sane. GDP, for the purposes of this graph, is stuff measured in dollars, per time, so "value"/time. The estimates are not that different from linear regressions, asymptotically. That's it. "Productivity" is a nebulous concept. Ultimately, we only "see" the value in the market price of things being exchanged, so productivity is thus reasoning backwards with division/differentiation. There is no empirically rigorous notion of per-person productivity to integrate over, and whether the ability to divide/differential makes that platonically-valid concept nonetheless a murky philosophical debate one need not get into to understand this graph.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Stagnating wages encourage employers to hire people for less productive work. We have an aging population so more productivity will be welcome.
melling 5y ago
“If total factor productivity had continued to grow at its 1957 to 1973 rate then we today would be living in the world of 2076 rather than in the world of 2014.” I grew up watching the original Star Trek series in reruns in the 1970’s. 2021 is not what I imagined. Back to the Future 2 took place in 2015 Blade Runner was 2019 So, I’d say we all expected quite a bit more. The world changed much more in the 50 years before I was born than 50 years after Something definitely went wrong somewhere
- matthewdgreen 5y ago
  If you were expecting reactionless flying cars and literal hoverboards in 2015, you probably should have found a different source for your technology predictions than a Spielberg movie.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    But if you grandparents told you everything we can do with 10cm diameter pneumatic tubes should be done that with them by now, I have nothing to cushion the blow.
  - mycall 5y ago
    Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQzLrvz4DKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQzLrvz4DKQ
- rhapsodic 5y ago
  > Something definitely went wrong somewhere Yes, the TV and Movie industries created a lot of unrealistic expectations in your mind.
  - melling 5y ago
    1920-1970 1970-2020 I think most people would agree that in the 50 years before 1970, the world changed more?
xwdv 5y ago
The only thing that has been accelerating into the future I think is the stock market. The price levels we are seeing today weren’t expected until at least a whole decade from now, and they are continuing to climb. Money is the only thing that can transcend time and space.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  doesn't that...worry you?
  - crypto420 5y ago
    It most definitely does. If money is a medium for people to convert goods and services from one form to another, then in a technologically advancing world where things become cheaper in terms of SI units, we should expect the value of money (relative to other items) to become higher, or for goods and services to become so cheap that we don't even bother about their prices. In a technologically stagnating economy, we can expect the opposite: we can expect that if technology becomes worse off, then the value of money will get worse and the same physical item will become less valuable i.e will cost more in money. We see this happening with oil prices which are at the heart of energy intensive economies - gasoline is MORE expensive than in the 1970s even when adjusted for inflation. Same goes for other goods central to the economy, such as housing, healthcare and food. The more likely outcome is that to artificially stimulate the economy, central banks will keep printing more money and devalue goods in a never ending cycle. The only things that can really save us is technology that can make things cheaper. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjust... It seems that Peter Thiel's ideas of a technologically stagnating society are making more and more sense.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    No, because I’m invested in the market, and wherever it goes, I go. But the people who are waiting it out? They are guaranteed to fall behind, they will be living in 2014 while I am in 2041. The market will only look scarier and scarier as the numbers go up and to the right.
croes 5y ago
Since when is the GDP a metric for The Future? I think we have different understandings of the word Future.
croes 5y ago
Fortunately, such guys are not physicists.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Can someone explain that graph? I thought each of the blue lines (the "vintages" if you will) corresponds to a CBO estimate made in that particular year, e.g. the 2005 line would project forward from 2005 reality. But if you look at some of the lines, that interpretation doesn't make sense. For example, the dark blue "2010" line is already well above the actual data (the black line) in 2010. So what do these CBO estimate "vintages" actually represent?
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  If this were some shady crypto thing I'd assume it was juicing the numbers to get more money on board. :^)
yodelshady 5y ago
> By the way, don’t blame the forecasters. The forecast was reasonable, the reality is below expectation. Sounds like a macro-economist to me. There's a full-blown, easily predictable and indeed predicted, environmental crisis that's *never* going away. Mitigating it requires a commitment to what any reasonable person considers a significant drop in living standards in both the developed world, *and* among the peoples of the developing world, who did nothing to deserve it.
- unsigner 5y ago
  But we are getting the drop in living standards before any significant effort is spent on the environmental crisis you are alluding to. And handling that crisis will require even higher productivity and technological growth. Instead we see decline after decline.
- RandomLensman 5y ago
  Give it a billion years or so and the aging sun will boil/blow earth's atmosphere away. So not "never". That drop in living standards isn't required either. Some might want such a policy path, but that is a different issue.
- Zababa 5y ago
  > and among the peoples of the developing world, who did nothing to deserve it. I don't agree at all here. People in the developing world don't consume/pollute less because of some kind of moral virtue, they consume/pollute less because they physically can't consume/pollute more. If they had the ability to pollute as much as the developped countries, they would do it (and some are in fact already doing it).
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  > Mitigating it requires a commitment to what any reasonable person considers a significant drop in living standards in both the developed world Nope, unless you consider living in cities not suburbs intrinsically worse. GDP has some flaws as a metric, but the "real good thing" so-far correlates with it simply because we aren't doing shit about the environment. There's no reason we can ramp up electrifying everything and live nice lives. Hell, if the population actually goes down as expected, maybe we can reduce total land devoted to agriculture too which would be really nice. The best way to do it and feel rich is to not be so obsessed with expensive electric-battery cars, and do more public transit, which I why partly I say it's the suburbs that drag us down.
deathhand 5y ago
"The future is here but not evenly distributed" Society has scalability problem. It might be the inability for the human mind to care about every little detail of life that makes it function or with increased scale comes with greater perverse actors and the system needs needs counterweight to it. America has been divided packaged and sold with little care about the ramifications down the road. We started off well, we broke up monopolies,(standard oil) protected people woth(glass-steagall) but then we lost our way and trillions can now be lost by the pentagon with little then a blink. Local construction costs skyrocket compared to other parts of the world, and we've created a horrible system of guaranteed profit in both colleges and homes allowing the prices to be inflated.
- lisper 5y ago
  > We started off well I'm not sure that's true. We started off with slavery. Then we had a civil war. Then we had Jim Crow. Then we had disco. ;-) America has always had problems. We just have a tendency to forget about them and focus on the positive aspects of the past. (I think reasonable people can disagree on the merits of this approach.)
  - deathhand 5y ago
    Fair point but as it relates to technology.. we can't progress if things hold us back. Wealth inequality being the greatest thing doing so.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Oh, yeah, if we never had any economic crisis, the GDP would be much higher. Whatever that phrase means... Because linking it directly with technology or happiness doesn't make any sense. It either means "if we use a less meaningful number that always got up, it would be higher" or "if people improved things faster, they would be better now, but let's not focus on what could improve faster or how".
paxys 5y ago
Probably wrong to correlate GDP/productivity with "the future" (whatever that means). The author seems to imply that if the 2008 financial crisis didn't happen then we'd have flying cars or something today, but I fail to see the connection.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  I see it as entrenched wealthy capital interests were far more interested in maximizing their paper clips than improving real world productivity outputs or distributing what was produced more widely.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Rich people as a class just throw their money where the returns our at. But if everyone else's purchasing power hasn't kept up with productivity gains, increasing productive capacity yet further isn't profitable, no matter how altruistic each rich person investor is.
    - kamray23 5y ago
      Then we must be reaching either a plateau or a tipping point in societal development and I really really really hope it's a tipping point in a good way.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    You mean their individual wealth has become a high score?
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      Yes in part, but also the investment opportunities presented to them are generally only incidentally aligned or even long term misaligned with needs of increasing the resilience of the economy - or even of making long term growth decisions.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
decebalus1 5y ago
I see all these posts and comments talking about productivity and the problem being the growth of productivity. Productivity wasn't ever a problem. Productivity has definitely increased. The problem is who or what benefits from it. My layman hypothesis is that a lot of created value has been thesaurized.
- booleandilemma 5y ago
  Thesaurized means “hoarded” for anyone else wondering :)
  - decebalus1 5y ago
    that's right. I didn't mean to make it sound fancy. The same term exists in my native tongue and it's the preferred term in the context of economics.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  The problem with increasing productivity is that one consumption stops keeping up, it kicks off a bad spiral: spending/productity goes down labor income goes down spending goes down (rich people save much more) spending/productivity goes down ... In principle, this can continue until the now-overkill old (physical) capital falls apart, and perhaps knowledge that went with it, and living amidst ruins, spending/productivity stabilizes again.
hsavit1 5y ago
Some of the best talent is working hard to make the world a better place… at Facebook. No wonder why society hasn’t transformed into a solarpunk utopia
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Because when spending is insufficient the prop up employment, money flows to advertising to squeeze out every last bit of demand, rather than productive capacity so supply can keep up with demand.
Jensson 5y ago
When you create a new normal level you will often get a two sided exponential getting there. First you see exponential increase as more and more opportunities to exploit the new normal are exploited. But then you see the rate of change exponentially reduce as the opportunities left to change gets exhausted, until there are none left and the new normal is reached. The typical example is how at first a technology is only used by a very small amount of people, then it becomes common and then it becomes ubiquitous. Happened with cars 60 years ago, computers 20 years ago. So it isn't that the future is getting farther away, we are just running out of ways to exploit the advancements we made decades ago. We might make more such leaps, for example in AI, but you can't count on it. Instead any sensible economic policy should be able to handle both scenarios, ie the one where we stagnate and the one where we find new things.
Zababa 5y ago
I wonder if refinement culture https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture is a consequence of that?
nootropicat 5y ago
There's no escape from physical reality - real wealth is energy and matter, not bits*. There's only one true development metric - the Kardashev's scale. Why - because no matter what any individual civilization values, once two civilizations meet, one that's sufficiently higher on the Kardashev's scale can effortlessly destroy the other, making it an objective value metric in the universe. Bits are of course necessary for organizing large-scale energy and matter manipulation - but efficiency can never go above 100%. Transport switched from manually planned transport routes to optimally solving the traveling salesman problem (NP completeness doesn't mean it can't be solved efficiently for real world problems, see eg. Gurobi) - significant gains from planning are over. Right now, global energy shortage is directly visible: coal shortage and electricity rationing in China. Total blackout in Lebanon. Gas shortage in Europe. Coal shortage in India. Without a massive increase in energy production, rest of 21st century is going to return to the pre-industrial norm of ~zero economic growth per capita. https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/108875635/hew020f05.tif https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/108875635/hew020f... from "Six centuries of British economic growth: a time-series perspective" https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162 https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162 * - without going into fundamentals of physics that make them all, eventually, equivalent
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
smelter 5y ago
We could have had Mars colonies and flying cars in the 1980s. But we have chosen instead to Dull Our Senses With Valium. Oversaturate the "intellectual" labor market via some hastily approved dissertations that told us things we already knew, so that perhaps R&D funding could be directed towards the discovery of a new brain altering molecule not found in Nature. You saw to it that hundreds of cohorts of strong soldiers were paid in tax dollars for two decades securing the region where the majority of the worlds opium poppies grow ("democracy implementation"). Seventeen years before the Chernobyl/Challenger explosion, a generation of Brood X Cicada emerged after a battle group of impressively engineered UH-1 Huey Gunships dispersed Agent Orange all over the Lungs Of The Earth (but not the Strategic Rubber Trees necessary for Your Car Culture). Virtual reality has provided the healthcare for thousands of people who keep their warm bodies at a desk creating a fake world for someone to "experience" in the "safety" of their Climate Controlled Box. This very moment, a digital animator is getting paid Greater Than or Equal to the salary of a plumber, electrician, carpenter, welder, or robotics engineer to draw some aliens and spaceships, all day long, telling an imaginative story filled with information that adds nothing useful to the knowledge pool of an audience. "Art". Every time you see litter strewn about a parking lot, or a tent city under a bridge - remember that "squalor" is an attitude and independent of the amount of digits in your bank account. It happens because you let it, because you don't care or are too frightened to do something about it. You don't want to "Hurt Someone's Feelings With Discipline". These scenes are stains on the society you have neglected, but you can afford to fly over it and escape to personal bunkers as a "life hack" to avoid the decay we are now enduring. Take The Money And Run. "Someone else's problem". Most of your "millionaires" just have amplified versions of what most people need to function in this society. Low-brow envy provocation. If you need a house, they will have at least one and it will be bigger than yours. If you need a car, they will have allocated to themselves an entire fleet (can you drive more than one at a time?) that goes faster than you (speed equally limited in shared congestion of neglected infrastructure). If you need a mate, they are going to flex as advertisement of all their possessions to attract as many as possible. Lipstick on a Pig. You are worshipping simple tools like cars [0], phones [1], and clothes [2]. Your civilization's treasury is being raided by children's minds in adult bodies, whose guardians planted them inside the greenhouse so that they would be sheltered from the winds and waves [3]. Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Hard Times Create Strong Men. You do not possess a culture worth spreading. Perhaps you will inherit the Earth, but your filthy ideals will not contaminate Mars. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWMpHc77qNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWMpHc77qNI [1] https://www.youthfeed.org/mobile/most-expensive-phone/ https://www.youthfeed.org/mobile/most-expensive-phone/ [2] https://poshmark.com/listing/GUCCI-DOUBLE-BREASTED-SUIT-NWT-5ff7992c47e0e40230a86c02?utm_source=shopzilla&ad_partner=shopzilla&cnxclid=16338912274670936051310080302008005 https://poshmark.com/listing/GUCCI-DOUBLE-BREASTED-SUIT-NWT-... [3] https://youtu.be/1FjOIqSuhO8?t=679 https://youtu.be/1FjOIqSuhO8?t=679 Tyler Durden's Rubber Band
archibaldJ 5y ago
All I see are arbitrary exponential functions being drawn to extend the existing line. Maybe I'm "being gen-z" but it's crazy to know that people actually bought into this when global warming, etc, are not accounted by people drawing the lines (and so are any forms of black sheep events/inventions)
ladyattis 5y ago
As much as I feel like joining in the "well you see the world went wrong" kind of argument the reality is that GDP isn't a great measure for growth. Even the economist who came up with GDP felt it was a grossly incomplete metric and wanted to figure out how to add in the economic activity of homemakers as well into the equation but Congress like most organizations love numbers even if they're not that useful. So we're stuck with an incomplete metric that in most cases is a meaningless figure. Sure, you can pump the GDP up many ways to make it look like you're doing great all the while the average life of expectancy of your citizens slides back (see the US even before COVID).

93 points by eitau_1 5y ago

I found the comment that linked the article where that graph appeared (https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/a-big-fiscal-push-is-urgent-the-risk-of-overheating-is-small https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/a-big-fiscal...) to be a much more informative and useful reference.

mcguire 5y ago
As that article points out, the real response to that graph is, "Good lord, what happened in 2008-2009?!"

jchw 5y ago

I’m trying to figure out how productivity rates could possibly be construed as the only important metric for what constitutes “the future.” Doesn’t that sound like a paperclip maximizer kind of perspective? Am I missing something?

ksdale 5y ago
Productivity is basically a measure of how much stuff we get per person. Obviously stuff isn't the only thing that matters, but once upon a time, everyone had to spend all of their time growing food. Now farming is 1,000 times more productive, and most everyone can do something else. The same with making clothes, furniture, etc. If we want a world where everyone can spend all of their time doing whatever they want and have enough, we're going to need a much more productive world.
- closeparen 5y ago
  Productivity also drives inequality. It’s at least a double edged sword.
  - ksdale 5y ago
    Are you suggesting it would be better if everyone were poor instead of just some people?
    - closeparen 5y ago
      Poverty is relative to your contemporaries. What does it mean to be poor in a developed country today? Flush toilets, a thermostat, a cell phone, probably even a car. A thousand calories from McDonalds for half an hour's labor. You'd be the envy of world history. Yet you're very obviously poor, because of the even better stuff that other people have. In the same way, the invention and adoption of all those things created a condition of poverty in the previously normal people who didn’t have them.
      - ksdale 5y ago
        So that's a yes?
        closeparen 5y ago
        Good for material conditions, bad for social conditions. How you balance those is your political alignment.
    - ddingus 5y ago
      There is another measure of wealth and that is time. Wealthy people purpose the majority of their time themselves. Poor people have most of their time purposed for them. When viewed this way, we see poverty is rampant here, even though many people have the various baubles and trinkets our modern society can produce.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    Productivity decreases demand for full time employment. Desiring full time employment is the double edged sword. The robots do the work for you but you still want to work and you want to do the "productive" part.
  - 5y ago
- jchw 5y ago
  There is an obvious gain when agriculture gets 1000x more productive, but there has to be a point where it becomes diminishing returns. How many more times will making agriculture 10x more productive noticeably improve people’s lives? At some point productivity has to stop being the only metric. I have a feeling productivity gains have already hit that point and the primary benefactor to further improvement is the producers.
  - mgraczyk 5y ago
    Based on food prices and the % of world income spent on food amongst the lowest income quartiles, another 10x or 100x would noticeably improve the lives of a large number of people. Part of this is an uneven global distribution of productivity gains, but even in developed countries there is plenty of room for innovation to stabilize prices and prevent shocks. For a comparison across countries, see figure 6 in https://www.fb.org/market-intel/u.s.-food-expenditures-at-home-and-abroad https://www.fb.org/market-intel/u.s.-food-expenditures-at-ho...
  - ksdale 5y ago
    We're very privileged to be able to wonder when enough productivity is enough. A huge portion of the world's population still lives in abject poverty and increased productivity would absolutely benefit them. And I think there were people 100 years ago making the same argument as you, that technology had advanced far enough that there was no need for more. FWIW, I agree that the focus on productivity at the exclusion of everything else is bad, the point of productivity is to live well, but I think there's a lot of the world that doesn't live well, and I think it is perhaps a failure of imagination to not believe that we could live better as well.
    - jchw 5y ago
      I find it rather ridiculous to view the inequities of society as a problem that should be solved by increasing productivity. I absolutely have a feeling that some of our biggest productivity gains have come on the backs of and sometimes maybe at the cost of worse quality of life in some parts of the world. Extremely cheap labor improves productivity numbers.
revolvingocelot 5y ago
For much of the 20th century, everybody from Bertrand Russell to the writers of the Jetsons seemed to think that accelerating productivity would allow everybody to work proportionally less. The owner class disagreed, and high productivity just meant higher profits because many more (increasingly lower quality) widgits are made per worker-hour. But just look at that GDP!!
- vorpalhex 5y ago
  That's fundamentally wrong. You are not living a 20th century lifestyle. You don't sit in a mostly wooden building with minimal electricity or gas lighting with reading and radio as your primary entertainment. At the very least you now have a computer that was certainly manufactured and assembled on the other half of the globe and transported to you. You likely have a lot of electrical appliances like ovens, a fridge, AC, and hot water. You likely don't live 3 or 4 generations to a 1000sq ft house. That we work the same in general has more to do with (imo positive) lifestyle inflation than some evil banker sitting on their slightly larger boat than the one you own.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    My computer costs less than a small lathe and the computer does more than the lathe.
    - vorpalhex 5y ago
      A small lathe is about $250 so unless you are using a Pi or Pinebook, that is unlikely. Your computer does _different_ stuff than a lathe. We need both computers and lathes in modern life.
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    What's fundamentally wrong? None of this has anything to do with greater productivity... It's not as though larger houses require a linear increase in construction workers; computers do not grow in vast fields necessitating hundreds of farm-hands. It's quite the opposite. GDP, which is what we were talking about, can rise forever because those who benefit will find ways to make it rise. Like, say, coupling difficult-to-access healthcare to it! Hey, now healthcare is a full fourth of it! Selling real estate and insurance to one another helps it increase, too! Line go up!! Something tells me that greater productivity allowed this cool and normal situation of proliferating middlemen to occur. The existence of relatively inexpensive ovens, etc, has been the case since easily 1970, which is around when productivity started to decouple from benefits to citizenry. I assume you're assured of this perspective because the existence of your boat makes you uncomfortable with the idea that we're using the insane productivity gains our species has realized to be gainfully employed not doing anything material or beneficial, but rather tricking people into clicking on ads. I understand whose shoulders I stand on, and I also understand that we don't really have to have the underpaid underclass to whom the ads are shown, we've just decided this way is better.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Don't get hung up on "If total factor productivity". https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/33080/dimensional-analysis-of-gdp https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/33080/dimensio... sort of clears some stuff up. Economists are not that good at dimensional analysis, despite their worship of physicists, and every physicist knowing dimensional analysis is key to staying sane. GDP, for the purposes of this graph, is stuff measured in dollars, per time, so "value"/time. The estimates are not that different from linear regressions, asymptotically. That's it. "Productivity" is a nebulous concept. Ultimately, we only "see" the value in the market price of things being exchanged, so productivity is thus reasoning backwards with division/differentiation. There is no empirically rigorous notion of per-person productivity to integrate over, and whether the ability to divide/differential makes that platonically-valid concept nonetheless a murky philosophical debate one need not get into to understand this graph.
imtringued 5y ago
Stagnating wages encourage employers to hire people for less productive work. We have an aging population so more productivity will be welcome.

melling 5y ago

“If total factor productivity had continued to grow at its 1957 to 1973 rate then we today would be living in the world of 2076 rather than in the world of 2014.” I grew up watching the original Star Trek series in reruns in the 1970’s. 2021 is not what I imagined. Back to the Future 2 took place in 2015 Blade Runner was 2019 So, I’d say we all expected quite a bit more. The world changed much more in the 50 years before I was born than 50 years after Something definitely went wrong somewhere

matthewdgreen 5y ago
If you were expecting reactionless flying cars and literal hoverboards in 2015, you probably should have found a different source for your technology predictions than a Spielberg movie.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  But if you grandparents told you everything we can do with 10cm diameter pneumatic tubes should be done that with them by now, I have nothing to cushion the blow.
- mycall 5y ago
  Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQzLrvz4DKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQzLrvz4DKQ
rhapsodic 5y ago
> Something definitely went wrong somewhere Yes, the TV and Movie industries created a lot of unrealistic expectations in your mind.
- melling 5y ago
  1920-1970 1970-2020 I think most people would agree that in the 50 years before 1970, the world changed more?

xwdv 5y ago

The only thing that has been accelerating into the future I think is the stock market. The price levels we are seeing today weren’t expected until at least a whole decade from now, and they are continuing to climb. Money is the only thing that can transcend time and space.

convolvatron 5y ago
doesn't that...worry you?
- crypto420 5y ago
  It most definitely does. If money is a medium for people to convert goods and services from one form to another, then in a technologically advancing world where things become cheaper in terms of SI units, we should expect the value of money (relative to other items) to become higher, or for goods and services to become so cheap that we don't even bother about their prices. In a technologically stagnating economy, we can expect the opposite: we can expect that if technology becomes worse off, then the value of money will get worse and the same physical item will become less valuable i.e will cost more in money. We see this happening with oil prices which are at the heart of energy intensive economies - gasoline is MORE expensive than in the 1970s even when adjusted for inflation. Same goes for other goods central to the economy, such as housing, healthcare and food. The more likely outcome is that to artificially stimulate the economy, central banks will keep printing more money and devalue goods in a never ending cycle. The only things that can really save us is technology that can make things cheaper. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjust... It seems that Peter Thiel's ideas of a technologically stagnating society are making more and more sense.
- xwdv 5y ago
  No, because I’m invested in the market, and wherever it goes, I go. But the people who are waiting it out? They are guaranteed to fall behind, they will be living in 2014 while I am in 2041. The market will only look scarier and scarier as the numbers go up and to the right.

croes 5y ago

Since when is the GDP a metric for The Future? I think we have different understandings of the word Future.

croes 5y ago

Fortunately, such guys are not physicists.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Can someone explain that graph? I thought each of the blue lines (the "vintages" if you will) corresponds to a CBO estimate made in that particular year, e.g. the 2005 line would project forward from 2005 reality. But if you look at some of the lines, that interpretation doesn't make sense. For example, the dark blue "2010" line is already well above the actual data (the black line) in 2010. So what do these CBO estimate "vintages" actually represent?

revolvingocelot 5y ago
If this were some shady crypto thing I'd assume it was juicing the numbers to get more money on board. :^)

yodelshady 5y ago

> By the way, don’t blame the forecasters. The forecast was reasonable, the reality is below expectation. Sounds like a macro-economist to me. There's a full-blown, easily predictable and indeed predicted, environmental crisis that's *never* going away. Mitigating it requires a commitment to what any reasonable person considers a significant drop in living standards in both the developed world, *and* among the peoples of the developing world, who did nothing to deserve it.

unsigner 5y ago
But we are getting the drop in living standards before any significant effort is spent on the environmental crisis you are alluding to. And handling that crisis will require even higher productivity and technological growth. Instead we see decline after decline.
RandomLensman 5y ago
Give it a billion years or so and the aging sun will boil/blow earth's atmosphere away. So not "never". That drop in living standards isn't required either. Some might want such a policy path, but that is a different issue.
Zababa 5y ago
> and among the peoples of the developing world, who did nothing to deserve it. I don't agree at all here. People in the developing world don't consume/pollute less because of some kind of moral virtue, they consume/pollute less because they physically can't consume/pollute more. If they had the ability to pollute as much as the developped countries, they would do it (and some are in fact already doing it).
Ericson2314 5y ago
> Mitigating it requires a commitment to what any reasonable person considers a significant drop in living standards in both the developed world Nope, unless you consider living in cities not suburbs intrinsically worse. GDP has some flaws as a metric, but the "real good thing" so-far correlates with it simply because we aren't doing shit about the environment. There's no reason we can ramp up electrifying everything and live nice lives. Hell, if the population actually goes down as expected, maybe we can reduce total land devoted to agriculture too which would be really nice. The best way to do it and feel rich is to not be so obsessed with expensive electric-battery cars, and do more public transit, which I why partly I say it's the suburbs that drag us down.

deathhand 5y ago

"The future is here but not evenly distributed" Society has scalability problem. It might be the inability for the human mind to care about every little detail of life that makes it function or with increased scale comes with greater perverse actors and the system needs needs counterweight to it. America has been divided packaged and sold with little care about the ramifications down the road. We started off well, we broke up monopolies,(standard oil) protected people woth(glass-steagall) but then we lost our way and trillions can now be lost by the pentagon with little then a blink. Local construction costs skyrocket compared to other parts of the world, and we've created a horrible system of guaranteed profit in both colleges and homes allowing the prices to be inflated.

lisper 5y ago
> We started off well I'm not sure that's true. We started off with slavery. Then we had a civil war. Then we had Jim Crow. Then we had disco. ;-) America has always had problems. We just have a tendency to forget about them and focus on the positive aspects of the past. (I think reasonable people can disagree on the merits of this approach.)
- deathhand 5y ago
  Fair point but as it relates to technology.. we can't progress if things hold us back. Wealth inequality being the greatest thing doing so.

marcosdumay 5y ago

Oh, yeah, if we never had any economic crisis, the GDP would be much higher. Whatever that phrase means... Because linking it directly with technology or happiness doesn't make any sense. It either means "if we use a less meaningful number that always got up, it would be higher" or "if people improved things faster, they would be better now, but let's not focus on what could improve faster or how".

paxys 5y ago

Probably wrong to correlate GDP/productivity with "the future" (whatever that means). The author seems to imply that if the 2008 financial crisis didn't happen then we'd have flying cars or something today, but I fail to see the connection.

dv_dt 5y ago
I see it as entrenched wealthy capital interests were far more interested in maximizing their paper clips than improving real world productivity outputs or distributing what was produced more widely.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Rich people as a class just throw their money where the returns our at. But if everyone else's purchasing power hasn't kept up with productivity gains, increasing productive capacity yet further isn't profitable, no matter how altruistic each rich person investor is.
  - kamray23 5y ago
    Then we must be reaching either a plateau or a tipping point in societal development and I really really really hope it's a tipping point in a good way.
- imtringued 5y ago
  You mean their individual wealth has become a high score?
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    Yes in part, but also the investment opportunities presented to them are generally only incidentally aligned or even long term misaligned with needs of increasing the resilience of the economy - or even of making long term growth decisions.
Ericson2314 5y ago

decebalus1 5y ago

I see all these posts and comments talking about productivity and the problem being the growth of productivity. Productivity wasn't ever a problem. Productivity has definitely increased. The problem is who or what benefits from it. My layman hypothesis is that a lot of created value has been thesaurized.

booleandilemma 5y ago
Thesaurized means “hoarded” for anyone else wondering :)
- decebalus1 5y ago
  that's right. I didn't mean to make it sound fancy. The same term exists in my native tongue and it's the preferred term in the context of economics.
Ericson2314 5y ago
The problem with increasing productivity is that one consumption stops keeping up, it kicks off a bad spiral: spending/productity goes down labor income goes down spending goes down (rich people save much more) spending/productivity goes down ... In principle, this can continue until the now-overkill old (physical) capital falls apart, and perhaps knowledge that went with it, and living amidst ruins, spending/productivity stabilizes again.

hsavit1 5y ago

Some of the best talent is working hard to make the world a better place… at Facebook. No wonder why society hasn’t transformed into a solarpunk utopia

deleted 5y ago
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Ericson2314 5y ago
Because when spending is insufficient the prop up employment, money flows to advertising to squeeze out every last bit of demand, rather than productive capacity so supply can keep up with demand.

Jensson 5y ago

When you create a new normal level you will often get a two sided exponential getting there. First you see exponential increase as more and more opportunities to exploit the new normal are exploited. But then you see the rate of change exponentially reduce as the opportunities left to change gets exhausted, until there are none left and the new normal is reached. The typical example is how at first a technology is only used by a very small amount of people, then it becomes common and then it becomes ubiquitous. Happened with cars 60 years ago, computers 20 years ago. So it isn't that the future is getting farther away, we are just running out of ways to exploit the advancements we made decades ago. We might make more such leaps, for example in AI, but you can't count on it. Instead any sensible economic policy should be able to handle both scenarios, ie the one where we stagnate and the one where we find new things.

Zababa 5y ago

I wonder if refinement culture https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture https://paulskallas.substack.com/p/refinement-culture is a consequence of that?

nootropicat 5y ago

There's no escape from physical reality - real wealth is energy and matter, not bits*. There's only one true development metric - the Kardashev's scale. Why - because no matter what any individual civilization values, once two civilizations meet, one that's sufficiently higher on the Kardashev's scale can effortlessly destroy the other, making it an objective value metric in the universe. Bits are of course necessary for organizing large-scale energy and matter manipulation - but efficiency can never go above 100%. Transport switched from manually planned transport routes to optimally solving the traveling salesman problem (NP completeness doesn't mean it can't be solved efficiently for real world problems, see eg. Gurobi) - significant gains from planning are over. Right now, global energy shortage is directly visible: coal shortage and electricity rationing in China. Total blackout in Lebanon. Gas shortage in Europe. Coal shortage in India. Without a massive increase in energy production, rest of 21st century is going to return to the pre-industrial norm of ~zero economic growth per capita. https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/108875635/hew020f05.tif https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/108875635/hew020f... from "Six centuries of British economic growth: a time-series perspective" https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162 https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162 * - without going into fundamentals of physics that make them all, eventually, equivalent

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smelter 5y ago

We could have had Mars colonies and flying cars in the 1980s. But we have chosen instead to Dull Our Senses With Valium. Oversaturate the "intellectual" labor market via some hastily approved dissertations that told us things we already knew, so that perhaps R&D funding could be directed towards the discovery of a new brain altering molecule not found in Nature. You saw to it that hundreds of cohorts of strong soldiers were paid in tax dollars for two decades securing the region where the majority of the worlds opium poppies grow ("democracy implementation"). Seventeen years before the Chernobyl/Challenger explosion, a generation of Brood X Cicada emerged after a battle group of impressively engineered UH-1 Huey Gunships dispersed Agent Orange all over the Lungs Of The Earth (but not the Strategic Rubber Trees necessary for Your Car Culture). Virtual reality has provided the healthcare for thousands of people who keep their warm bodies at a desk creating a fake world for someone to "experience" in the "safety" of their Climate Controlled Box. This very moment, a digital animator is getting paid Greater Than or Equal to the salary of a plumber, electrician, carpenter, welder, or robotics engineer to draw some aliens and spaceships, all day long, telling an imaginative story filled with information that adds nothing useful to the knowledge pool of an audience. "Art". Every time you see litter strewn about a parking lot, or a tent city under a bridge - remember that "squalor" is an attitude and independent of the amount of digits in your bank account. It happens because you let it, because you don't care or are too frightened to do something about it. You don't want to "Hurt Someone's Feelings With Discipline". These scenes are stains on the society you have neglected, but you can afford to fly over it and escape to personal bunkers as a "life hack" to avoid the decay we are now enduring. Take The Money And Run. "Someone else's problem". Most of your "millionaires" just have amplified versions of what most people need to function in this society. Low-brow envy provocation. If you need a house, they will have at least one and it will be bigger than yours. If you need a car, they will have allocated to themselves an entire fleet (can you drive more than one at a time?) that goes faster than you (speed equally limited in shared congestion of neglected infrastructure). If you need a mate, they are going to flex as advertisement of all their possessions to attract as many as possible. Lipstick on a Pig. You are worshipping simple tools like cars [0], phones [1], and clothes [2]. Your civilization's treasury is being raided by children's minds in adult bodies, whose guardians planted them inside the greenhouse so that they would be sheltered from the winds and waves [3]. Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Hard Times Create Strong Men. You do not possess a culture worth spreading. Perhaps you will inherit the Earth, but your filthy ideals will not contaminate Mars. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWMpHc77qNI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWMpHc77qNI [1] https://www.youthfeed.org/mobile/most-expensive-phone/ https://www.youthfeed.org/mobile/most-expensive-phone/ [2] https://poshmark.com/listing/GUCCI-DOUBLE-BREASTED-SUIT-NWT-5ff7992c47e0e40230a86c02?utm_source=shopzilla&ad_partner=shopzilla&cnxclid=16338912274670936051310080302008005 https://poshmark.com/listing/GUCCI-DOUBLE-BREASTED-SUIT-NWT-... [3] https://youtu.be/1FjOIqSuhO8?t=679 https://youtu.be/1FjOIqSuhO8?t=679 Tyler Durden's Rubber Band

archibaldJ 5y ago

All I see are arbitrary exponential functions being drawn to extend the existing line. Maybe I'm "being gen-z" but it's crazy to know that people actually bought into this when global warming, etc, are not accounted by people drawing the lines (and so are any forms of black sheep events/inventions)

ladyattis 5y ago

As much as I feel like joining in the "well you see the world went wrong" kind of argument the reality is that GDP isn't a great measure for growth. Even the economist who came up with GDP felt it was a grossly incomplete metric and wanted to figure out how to add in the economic activity of homemakers as well into the equation but Congress like most organizations love numbers even if they're not that useful. So we're stuck with an incomplete metric that in most cases is a meaningless figure. Sure, you can pump the GDP up many ways to make it look like you're doing great all the while the average life of expectancy of your citizens slides back (see the US even before COVID).