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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 t
by 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 agoProductivity also drives inequality. It’s at least a double edged sword.
- ksdale 5y agoAre you suggesting it would be better if everyone were poor instead of just some people?
- closeparen 5y agoPoverty 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 agoSo that's a yes?
- closeparen 5y agoGood for material conditions, bad for social conditions. How you balance those is your political alignment.
- ddingus 5y agoThere 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 agoProductivity 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 agoWe 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 agoThere 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 agoBased 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 agoWe'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 agoI 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.