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Here's one of his first serious mistakes: "The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, yet without producing measurably sup

Here's one of his first serious mistakes: "The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other country, yet without producing measurably superior results." That situation is always easy to obtain: Just do a sufficiently poor job at measuring the results. The tiny, short-term drop in the quantity he quotes says nothing, not even as much as zip, zilch, zero, about his claim of "trump" and lower productivity for the world. For such a claim, we'd need some data over a longer term and for much of the world and not just for the US. And we'd need more than the data: We'd also need some good candidate explanations. His article has no such and no references to any such. Instead, with so little data, some of the best data is striking and not in the article: Look at 'productivity', for the US and the world, in 'information technology'. E.g., it was not so long ago that 1 billion bytes of disk was in a box about the size of a large SUV and would really set you back, and now can get 1 billion bytes in main memory for about $5, retail. For just disk, about $100 will buy about 3 trillion bytes. It may be that of the 1 billion byte boxes, they never sold in total as many as 3000 for 3 trillion bytes. There was a time with reports that FedEx had, in total, 7 trillion bytes of disk. Now that's about $300 in a mid-tower case for about $100, actually, a whole computer with four processor cores for less than $1000. Did someone mention 'productivity'? Think about telephones: I well remember paying monthly telephone bills of well over $100. Not anymore! Think of mobile phones, useful in many trades, e.g., electricians and plumbers, nearly anyone who in their job spends a lot of time in a car: A mobile phone used to be just some radio in, say, a police car; then a mobile phone was about the size of a brick; then a mobile phone would fit in a shirt pocket; now a mobile phone is a quite capable computer, Web browser, video camera, movie player, electronic funds transfer device, etc. Think about tire life: It used to be that 10,000 miles was good tire life. Now can routinely get 80,000 miles. Better chemistry for better tires! Cars are safer with more air bags, body designs better in crashes, anti-lock brakes, stability control, various warning systems, etc. So, auto insurance rates should go down, and that's 'productivity'. Carbon brake disks are coming to cars, and the disks can be guaranteed for the life of the car. "Look, Ma: No more brake jobs!". Think about car engine life: With all the computer controls, get much less gas and water in the oil and, thus, get much longer engine life. Think about the changes in house building materials and tools: Now can put up a house for many fewer worker hours. And house insulation: Have much better insulated roofs, walls, doors, and windows, with much less air leakage, for much lower HVAC bills. Seen a cargo ship lately? They are HUGE, carrying oil, natural gas, or containers, with much better cost per ton-mile. Bandwidth should count: Kept track lately? Now can put several trillion bits per second on one wavelength, some dozens of wavelengths on one long-haul fiber, maybe 144 fibers in one cable, and several cables along a road, pipeline, high voltage electric line, river, coastline, etc. Remember the 'T-1 leased line' from Ma Bell? That was 1.5 million bits per second (Mbps) for over $1000 a month. Now for less than $60 a month I have 15 Mbps download speed and 2 Mbps upload speed. For another $65 a month I can get a static IP address, 101 Mbps download speed, and 15 Mbps upload speed. We're talking at least 10 times the data rate for about one tenth the cost for a 'productivity' increase of 100:1, before counting inflation. We were talking about 'productivity', right? Heck, now robots are cheap enough that even the Chinese are converting from manual assembly to robots. A guy had some chest pains. In the hospital they did an angiogram, found a clot in a coronary artery, sucked it out, and sent him home the same day. To get home he drove his own car. Did someone mention "productivity"? I still have a nice sack full of gorgeous Nikon camera equipment. But it uses just film. It's still okay, but now a digital sensor can have 48 million individual sensors, four for each pixel, that is, two for green and one for each of red and blue in a little square, giving 12 million pixels giving an array of 3000 by 4000 pixels. So, no film developing! Anyone mention 'productivity'? Maybe ask Kodak? Have a question about something, from how to get stains out of cloth to how to configure SQL Server, etc. Okay. Do a Google search and find blogs, fora, PDF files, etc. Or go to Wikipedia, Quora, or HN. Used to be had to drive to a library, maybe even a university library. Anyone mention 'productivity'? Ask the USPS about 'productivity': They have discovered that the Internet has replaced a significant fraction of their mail volume, so significant that they are in financial trouble and having to close some post offices. Work in some technical field with a lot of math, say, math, physics, engineering? Try to get the typing done? Hope you never had to do that; commonly the typing was more work than the technical work. Now with computers, Knuth's TeX, laser printers, and PDF, the typing is reasonable and routine. The productivity gains here are some factors of 10; for technical writing, we're talking another Gutenberg. Gotten a printed bank statement in the mail lately? I get my bank statements as PDF files over the Internet. 'Productivity' anyone? It used to be that a bank had to physically sort the checks and have someone visually read the check and manually key in the amount. Not anymore! Now at a retail site, the 'check' is mostly just nonsense, just my receipt, and the transaction is all electronic. The amount is keyed in at the cash register for the first and last time. 'Productivity'? anyone? My driveway is steep, and last winter I needed tire chains to get out but had no tire chains. But the Internet worked! So, I ordered some tire chains from Amazon, got them, put them on, and drove out! I didn't have to get towed out or drive to an auto parts store for the chains. We were talking about 'productivity'? Intel is now down to 14 nm line width (Atom processors), and has stated that they see their way clear to putting 1000 cores on a processor and having them work together effectively. We were talking about what, 'productivity'? Let's see: The key to productivity is automation. Now the key to automation is computer control. Computer control is based on computer hardware, which keeps falling rapidly in price, and computer software. The ability to develop software has increased enormously with progress in, e.g., Windows and .NET. We just now have the computers, disk storage, operating systems, middle-ware, languages, libraries, networks, and Web services for some astounding progress: We should be at the beginning of by a wide margin the greatest increase, in percentage and absolute terms, of productivity in all of history. Now what was it we were talking about, hmm, 'productivity'?

forensic 15y ago
Technology enriches technologists and capitalists, but it actually impoverishes the uneducated masses because they no longer have jobs and cannot afford higher education. The missing link in your story is that the secretaries and phone operators and librarians put out of work cannot afford retraining and cannot get loans to retrain. So they are converted from middle class wage earners to the ghettoized poor. Without a social safety net, gains in productivity only benefit a small minority. The middle class is being cannibalized by your kind of thinking.
- NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
  Yes. A LOT of sales people got replaced by Web sites. And technology also replaced many book store clerks, telephone operators, etc. In some ways it's a BAD situation. But, in 'productivity', that is, economic results per dollar, that remains. It's just that increases in 'productivity' don't always mean an increase in standard of living, quality of life, better society, etc. All I addressed was productivity, not standard of living, 'the social contract', 'financial security', a 'better society', etc. You are absolutely correct that much of the technology that has increased productivity has hurt a LOT of people. And it is very true that our society needs to do something about this situation. And, moreover, if count the cost of the 'safety net' for the people put out of work for the technology, then it may be that, with also the cost of the technology, sometimes there is a net loss in 'productivity'. For another example, Google, Craig's List, etc. are putting out of work a LOT of people in the classified ads departments of newspapers. Heck, the Internet is putting a lot of newspapers and magazines out of business: Newsweek just sold for, what, $1 to someone who wanted to run it as a personal interest instead of a business? I haven't gotten a newspaper or magazine on paper in years, and last week I finally hauled out three really heavy, big, green plastic bags of old magazines. Still, in the long term, larger picture, and in the sense of the article, 'productivity' marches ahead. We don't like all the downside, but, still, we don't really want to go back. So, we need to find better solutions for how to move ahead. Sure, it's too easy to see that too soon we will have to give everyone a basic 'stipend' so that anyone who wants more can work and make much more. Doing this and keeping a 'productive' society will NOT be easy. Or, what happens when Robots, Inc. makes a robot for $1000 that can do the work of over 90% of the current jobs? Still, the article and I were writing about JUST 'productivity' and not at all about your, justified, concerns about 'quality of life'.

forensic 15y ago

Technology enriches technologists and capitalists, but it actually impoverishes the uneducated masses because they no longer have jobs and cannot afford higher education. The missing link in your story is that the secretaries and phone operators and librarians put out of work cannot afford retraining and cannot get loans to retrain. So they are converted from middle class wage earners to the ghettoized poor. Without a social safety net, gains in productivity only benefit a small minority. The middle class is being cannibalized by your kind of thinking.

NY_Entrepreneur 15y ago
Yes. A LOT of sales people got replaced by Web sites. And technology also replaced many book store clerks, telephone operators, etc. In some ways it's a BAD situation. But, in 'productivity', that is, economic results per dollar, that remains. It's just that increases in 'productivity' don't always mean an increase in standard of living, quality of life, better society, etc. All I addressed was productivity, not standard of living, 'the social contract', 'financial security', a 'better society', etc. You are absolutely correct that much of the technology that has increased productivity has hurt a LOT of people. And it is very true that our society needs to do something about this situation. And, moreover, if count the cost of the 'safety net' for the people put out of work for the technology, then it may be that, with also the cost of the technology, sometimes there is a net loss in 'productivity'. For another example, Google, Craig's List, etc. are putting out of work a LOT of people in the classified ads departments of newspapers. Heck, the Internet is putting a lot of newspapers and magazines out of business: Newsweek just sold for, what, $1 to someone who wanted to run it as a personal interest instead of a business? I haven't gotten a newspaper or magazine on paper in years, and last week I finally hauled out three really heavy, big, green plastic bags of old magazines. Still, in the long term, larger picture, and in the sense of the article, 'productivity' marches ahead. We don't like all the downside, but, still, we don't really want to go back. So, we need to find better solutions for how to move ahead. Sure, it's too easy to see that too soon we will have to give everyone a basic 'stipend' so that anyone who wants more can work and make much more. Doing this and keeping a 'productive' society will NOT be easy. Or, what happens when Robots, Inc. makes a robot for $1000 that can do the work of over 90% of the current jobs? Still, the article and I were writing about JUST 'productivity' and not at all about your, justified, concerns about 'quality of life'.