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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 l

by 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.
  - tomjen3 5y ago
    We measure equality wrong. We measure it on income, but should measure it on what we can get for it. And that way we are more equal now than we have ever been. A cheap car is better, more fuel efficient and safer than a good car was 20 years ago. Poor people can get treatment for AIDS today, something rich people couldn't 30 years 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.

by jchw 5y ago

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.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  We measure equality wrong. We measure it on income, but should measure it on what we can get for it. And that way we are more equal now than we have ever been. A cheap car is better, more fuel efficient and safer than a good car was 20 years ago. Poor people can get treatment for AIDS today, something rich people couldn't 30 years 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.