8 ms·

I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hund

I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? What about 100 SDRs doing this at the same time, every day? How about trying to meet with someone on the other side of the country? Or having to hire hundreds of assembly line workers to do the job of a single robot? No, we are more productive than ever before. But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich, which is why we live in one of the most unequal times since the gilded age. I hate this term but I honestly think it's just "FUD" put out by these uber-rich people, this sentiment of "oh the economy isn't becoming more productive". It is most definitely becoming more productive, but the only benefit Joe Average sees from that is slightly lower consumer prices (which of course is offset by skyrocketing asset prices). IIRC the only way society got out of this gini-out-of-the-bottle situation last time was through multiple cataclysmic wars, a great depression, and trust busting, so I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned.

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
All the productivity gains are nullified by a drop in risk-taking.
- adolph 4y ago
  + increased "compliance" measures
jstarfish 4y ago
> Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? A Rolodex used to be enough. Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  Act 2.0 was the desktop version of CRM. and alot of old systems had built in customer databases. had contact info in them. and zoom is cool but phones work in a lot of cases.
  - kylecordes 4y ago
    If your team was sitting at desks on a fast network, Act! probably obtained 80% of the productivity benefit of the best available, most expensive CRM available today. Or maybe even better than that; because (again assuming a fast network locally) it could be operated with keystrokes quite a lot faster than many of today’s CRM system. I worked in a place where we had phone, email, and FAX (!) integration set up also. A rep could be on a phone they didn't dial, configuring a quote for what their contact asked for, click a button and it emailed or faxed to the contact. Over 20 years ago.
- smegsicle 4y ago
  1000x increase in capability coupled with 1000x increase in waste
- DANK_YACHT 4y ago
  > Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something. A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least.
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    > A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least. Yes, absolutely true. Given "hundreds of filing cabinets" though, how many of those leads can or will even be contacted in the salesperson/company's lifetime? How many leads will themselves have died before you even get to their number? It's "advancement" only in the sense that we've made hoarding more efficient (which is a technical achievement in itself).
    - chii 4y ago
      > how many of those leads can or will even be contacted in the salesperson/company's lifetime? that's why you also have software to do it more efficiently - may be even automated ways of contacting the lead. AKA, spam. But it does increase sales.
  - prometheus76 4y ago
    They would get another rolodex.
sharemywin 4y ago
specifically they said since 2004 productivity increases were only 1% per year. cloud computing/saas probably adds to productivity but not as much as converting from files to desktop computer systems.
wvenable 4y ago
I'm not sure how they're measuring productivity. From my own experience as a software developer, I've seen how software makes individuals more productive. But the end result of this productivity is not 2x as much output overall but 0.5x as many people to achieve the same level of productivity. We're decreasing costs but maybe the market doesn't need 2x or 5x more productivity. There just isn't that kind of demand anywhere -- especially with fewer people working.
- gumby 4y ago
  "Productivity" means "amount of input required to get a given output." I think you might be thinking of "productivity" as a synonym for "output". Usually in economics the input is labor hours, but for example "energy intensity" is the productivity of how much energy a process uses. In the macroeconomic case it's GDP divided by total energy used, but some industries are more energy intensive than others -- they have lower productivity from their energy use. Thus 2X the output and same output with 1/2 the people are identical: both describe doubling productivity.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    > "Productivity" means "amount of input required to get a given output." I think you might be thinking of "productivity" as a synonym for "output". Okay but surely we're only talking about average productivity with some assumptions on the approximate employment rate and hours worked per week. No one is going to be impressed by a "5% increase in productivity" next year if unemployment rises to 99%, the 1% of remaining workers only work 10 hours per week, but the average hour yields 5% higher output than the previous year.
    - gumby 4y ago
      > Okay but surely we're only talking about average productivity with some assumptions on the approximate employment rate and hours worked per week. No. Productivity is simply output divided by some input factor. Employment rate, hours worked per week, wage: none are involved in that calculation (unless you're measuring productivity of the wage, i.e. COGS). > No one is going to be impressed by a "5% increase in productivity" next year if unemployment rises to 99%, the 1% of remaining workers only work 10 hours per week, but the average hour yields 5% higher output than the previous year. On the contrary, investors and managers will be very impressed by that.
ALittleLight 4y ago
I think the non-super rich see a lot of advantages from the modern economy. As an example, just yesterday, I was picking up an order at Walmart. The guy who brought the bags to my car had Airpods in. The existence of Airpods (and phones, Internet, Bluetooth, streaming services, etc) may not have made this guy more productive, but it probably improves his life somewhat.
- tobr 4y ago
  Am I missing something, or is this like the first time you see a guy with AirPods? What’s the significance?
  - EarthLaunch 4y ago
    It’s that people working boring or unpleasant jobs can have an audio environment of their choice. Music, podcasts, audiobooks. This wasn’t possible when it required a huge device, but AirPods are so unobtrusive and socially acceptable that workers can wear them without it attracting undue attention. Pranksters on YouTube use it for the same reason; people are used to seeing it and don’t associate it with receiving voice instructions.
  - kylecordes 4y ago
    One significant thing here: this is a piece of technology which no one in the entire world, at any level of wealth, had a couple decades ago. But today a person in a relatively low-ranked job carrying orders out at Walmart... casually has this technology for fun. This does not measure as a productivity improvement, but it’s pretty great. Most non-positional goods are like this. You getting Airpods doesn't make mine any worse. Statistically, you getting Airpods makes mine better, because it increases the chances of there being more content I like.
- evan_ 4y ago
  and when he gets home he can eat bread and watch the circus on his phone!
  - 4y ago
bombcar 4y ago
A massive CRM was possible in the early 90s on easily obtainable hardware. Earlier if you wanted to spend the money. It’s not immediately clear what Salesforce adds that literally couldn’t be done with 1995 tech.
throw8383833jj 4y ago
It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation: Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution 4T / 300 M/ 30 = 500$ per year (not exactly life changing wealth) So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year. I have a different theorey. The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY. *https://ips-dc.org/u-s-billionaire-wealth-surges-past-1-trillion-since-beginning-of-pandemic/ https://ips-dc.org/u-s-billionaire-wealth-surges-past-1-tril... At the end of the day, humans want simple solutions to simple problems and the "wealth going to the top" theorey is super easy to understand and super easy to solve. There's only one problem: it's not true. it's debunked now. The real problem of decreasing wealth is much harder to solve and has many causes
- mbrameld 4y ago
  > it's not true. it's debunked now Where has it been debunked?
- dahart 4y ago
  > So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year. Loaded use of the world “stole” there. This is a faulty analysis. It’s well studied and well known, for example, that the top 10% of people income wise have ~70% of the wealth in the US. Similar patterns exist globally. This has been reproduced many ways by many people and squarely contradicts your calculation.
  - throw8383833jj 4y ago
    "stole" or redistribute. the math works out the same in the end. the reason I used "stole" is because if you "redistribute" every ounce of someone's wealth, I imagine you might get some push back. You can re-apply this formula to various top N% but you get similar numbers: both for income redistribution and wealth redistribution. The reason all those articles of top 10% have 70% of the wealth seem so impressive is not because the top 10% have so much, it's because the rest of the 90% has so little. and so even a modest amount in the top 10% is much greater than the tiny bit the bottom 90 has.
DeWilde 4y ago
The gap between the richest and the poorest is probably the largest ever, but today people are also living far more comfortably than ever: electricity, heated water, food and water at a press of a button, generally good transportation to pretty much everywhere. What is lacking, for the less privileged, is mostly lack of access to affordable housing and a bad diet (arguably this is mostly due to the enticing nature of fast food and lack of education about how bad it is). Other than that the basic life necessities don't differ too wildly for the rich and the everyone who is not homeless.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  I believe it needs to also be said that bad diet is a side effect of everyone trying to produce with cheaper and cheaper materials. I shudder to think what kinds of ingredients are some of the foods I see in cheaper shops made from. This is not sustainable. It cannot last for that much longer IMO. Literally and metaphorically, people are getting sick of it. They notice. They are not dumb. They might be in denial (people just LOVE their chips and cola for some reason) but they are not dumb. I see more and more people in my neighborhood going to the local market and negotiating with vendors coming straight from agrarian villages for a "monthly subscription" of sorts -- you bring me one huge basket with fruits and veggies every weekend, I pay you, say, $200 a month. The vendor gets a stable income, you get actual bio food and don't have to pick and choose every tomato and parsley leaf every damn time. The vendors have a vested interest not to cheat their most stable and profitable customers. Sadly all these societal changes are glacially slow, giving the opportunists plenty of breathing room to swindle people and get rich for decades but oh well, until we develop collective consciousness it seems that this won't ever change... :|
- tstrimple 4y ago
  I think it's a little to easy to overlook the abject poverty which still exists in this country. More than two million Americans lack access to clean water or sanitation. I personally know millennials who didn't have hot water in their house growing up. They would heat water on the stove for baths, at least when their utilities were turned on. There exist towns where literal sewage is running out of people's houses in areas where kids play. Hookworm for example is still rampant in parts of the US. Half of our rivers and streams and one third of our lakes are too polluted to swim or fish in, much less drink from. 99% of households having a refrigerator doesn't mean these folk are living comfortably. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-lowndes-county-alabama-water-waste-treatment-poverty https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low... https://time.com/longform/clean-water-access-united-states/ https://time.com/longform/clean-water-access-united-states/
thewarrior 4y ago
Because software cannot produce resources just because it exists. Productivity refers to being able to actually manufacture more widgets and things like food, roads. Yes technology has made things cheaper. By moving things across the globe and creating a complex supply chain that can produce more goods for less energy and raw material input. But the per Capita availability of energy and minerals is a fundamental bottleneck that things like CRM software can only go so far in helping. The article talks about software that allows a call center employee to handle more customers better. This is great but how does something like this help society produce more heating and food which are currently in short supply ? It makes the company more profit and saves customers some money. But if they try to actually get more food it will cause inflation. I would highly encourage people to read the work of Vaclav Smil. In the grand scheme of things iPhones are irrelevant. Half the world depends on natural gas and ammonia fertilizer so they don't starve to death. We are living through the consequences of this as we speak. Software simply isn't on the scale of things like coal, oil, natural gas, electricity or even washing machines. Computers might be more like the printing press. Perhaps centuries from now we can look back and say what innovations came about due to multi century second order and third order effects. We in the industry have become lost in the world of bits and "productivity" in producing TikToks and targetting ads for mobile games doesn't help as much as we think towards supply. These are fundamentally ways of aggregating and coordinating demand. The problem is now on the supply side. We need software that runs on robots eliminating workers and working 24x7 doing things like mining, agriculture and warehouses. We also need eliminate middle men and deliver directly to the consumer. Beyond that we need fundamentally new energy sources. Software can help here but increasing digitization mainly creates fat middlemen who don't add as much productivity into the world as they take. Hence I think Chinas new approach to tech regulatuion that curtails middleman platforms and encourages startups on the supply side makes a lot of sense.
- gowld 4y ago
  Services are also productivity.
  - thewarrior 4y ago
    Yes but only to an extent. We cannot have an economy only of rappers and influencers.
bennysomething 4y ago
Lost me at the bit about fud from rich people. I really doubt there is a conspiracy.
Aunche 4y ago
Of course regular people are seeing benefits to increased productivity. The question is whether these benefits are really benefits at all. The average adult spends over 12 hours a day consuming media [1]. It's worth noting that much of this is passive consumption like radio in the background, but active consumption is undeniably increasing as well, most notably smartphone usage. I think the problem is that the more optimized our society becomes, the less true the economic assumption of rational human behavior becomes. Google Maps, for example, saves me time looking at maps rather than doing browsing Hackernews. However, when I think about it rationally, I was no less happy spending a few minutes planning my route before a trip instead of browsing HN during that same time. [1] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-nielsen-total-audience-report-august-2020/ https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-niels...
lkrubner 4y ago
“”””But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich”””” You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average. Total wealth is created by productivity and is then divided between labor and capital. Where labor unions are strong, more of the total wealth goes to labor, and where labor unions are weak, more of the total wealth goes to capital. It’s the total wealth per hour that has seen slow growth in recent decades. If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted. In the old days, an army of secretaries kept the world in order. Despite your intuitions, they did in fact have ways of quickly finding one file out of millions of files. And secretaries offered a flexibility that we’ve lost with computers. It is the loss of flexibility that causes computers to damage productivity.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  > Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted. To note, in the olden days, mistakes written in your record or misinterpretations (e.g.took the wrong record from the cabinet) would just have been a fact of life and nobody might even notice. Ms Wilson and Ms Wiston just shouldn't have been in the same hospital at the same time. As you say everything was more flexible, more fuzzy. If you wanted the world to look orderly you'd quickly sweap under the rug the misaligned bits or disappear what you don't want there. This is also why you use cash and paper register if you need your restaurant's finances to look pristine on paper while still racking in money that doesn't need to be accounted.
- njstraub608 4y ago
  > If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted. I would argue this isn’t necessarily because of computers but a byproduct of an antiquated system and process being codified into a computer. The reason for this seems to be that there are structural inefficiencies built into our healthcare system that create a ton of added complexity that is near impossible to unwind because of legal (contractual and privacy-related) risks. For example, any attempts at improving efficiency in patient care creates potential liabilities for medical professionals. People are scared to innovate in this space, so the programs are just digital translations of an existing process. This requires a time investment to learn the “new way” of doing the same thing, and builds inherit laziness because steps are still require that should have been automated away. Medical notes are a good example of this; it’s required to be documented in an extremely specific way and of a certain length because of insurance so it just ends up being copy and pasted, free text, by the physician to meet this requirement.
drewcoo 4y ago
Consider bullshit jobs. Yes, there's "work" being done, so it's "productive," but is it really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
throw0101a 4y ago
> I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. See Solow paradox: > The productivity paradox, also referred to as the Solow paradox, could refer either to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s despite rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) over the same period, or to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and developed countries from the 2000s to 2020s; sometimes the newer slowdown is referred to as the productivity slowdown, the productivity puzzle, or the productivity paradox 2.0. The 1970s to 1980s productivity paradox inspired many research efforts at explaining the slowdown, only for the paradox to disappear with renewed productivity growth in the developed countries in the 1990s. However, issues raised by those research efforts remain important in the study of productivity growth in general, and became important again when productivity growth slowed around the world again from the 2000s to the present day. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
mikewarot 4y ago
>Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? Yes, things are much faster now. But having to manually scan an entire office of files sequentially was never a thing. The files were alphabetized, indexed, collated. Clerks knew what they were doing. In digging through my home state of Indiana's Marriage records, they had an ingenious system that did a fair bit of error correction and sped up retrieval of information by orders of magnitude. This system goes back to the 1800s, consists of an index, and sequentially recorded Marriage Licenses, bound in the same book. Entries were indexed by both the groom and brides last name, which meant in most cases, you could recover from a single error. Worst case, you had to scan that one book for the County, for that year, or fraction thereof. If you knew the date, that made it much faster as well.
mikewarot 4y ago
Richard Nixon had a plan for dealing with this, but changed his mind at the last second. [1] 1 - https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-president-nixon-and-his-basic-income-bill/173117835-c34d6145 https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-presid...
kylecordes 4y ago
Where did all the productivity benefits go? The answer is probably: to competition. If one company got CRM, wow, huge productivity boost! They would sell so much more per unit of salesperson labor input. But it's a competitive world, so a lot of companies get CRM. The additional sales productivity gets competed back out; perhaps with the recipients of sales efforts (who now have a large increase in the amount of incoming contacts) losing/wasting as much productivity in aggregate as the companies using the software have gained. The same dynamic applies to many other areas. Not to all areas of course; there are also real massive, long term benefits to productivity. Famously it used to take over half of all human effort just to keep us fed. It doesn’t anymore.
iskander 4y ago
Medical record digitization seems to have had a neutral-to-negative impact on hospital efficiency. It's hard to believe since the alternative sounds mind-numbingly inefficient but there are tons of low-tech streamlined processes (like having a whiteboard in each patient's room) which are being undermined by having a constellation of disconnected staff all dumping information into Epic and not having time to read other entries.

Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago

All the productivity gains are nullified by a drop in risk-taking.

adolph 4y ago
+ increased "compliance" measures

jstarfish 4y ago

> Think about CRM software. Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? A Rolodex used to be enough. Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something.

sharemywin 4y ago
Act 2.0 was the desktop version of CRM. and alot of old systems had built in customer databases. had contact info in them. and zoom is cool but phones work in a lot of cases.
- kylecordes 4y ago
  If your team was sitting at desks on a fast network, Act! probably obtained 80% of the productivity benefit of the best available, most expensive CRM available today. Or maybe even better than that; because (again assuming a fast network locally) it could be operated with keystrokes quite a lot faster than many of today’s CRM system. I worked in a place where we had phone, email, and FAX (!) integration set up also. A rep could be on a phone they didn't dial, configuring a quote for what their contact asked for, click a button and it emailed or faxed to the contact. Over 20 years ago.
smegsicle 4y ago
1000x increase in capability coupled with 1000x increase in waste
DANK_YACHT 4y ago
> Advancement replacing it with "hundreds of filing cabinets" should tell you something. A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  > A rolodex was enough because that's all that could be managed by an individual. If the number of names needed by a person grew past the size of a rolodex, they were simply out of luck because no system existed that would allow them to efficiently handle that much data. That's my takeaway at least. Yes, absolutely true. Given "hundreds of filing cabinets" though, how many of those leads can or will even be contacted in the salesperson/company's lifetime? How many leads will themselves have died before you even get to their number? It's "advancement" only in the sense that we've made hoarding more efficient (which is a technical achievement in itself).
  - chii 4y ago
    > how many of those leads can or will even be contacted in the salesperson/company's lifetime? that's why you also have software to do it more efficiently - may be even automated ways of contacting the lead. AKA, spam. But it does increase sales.
- prometheus76 4y ago
  They would get another rolodex.

sharemywin 4y ago

specifically they said since 2004 productivity increases were only 1% per year. cloud computing/saas probably adds to productivity but not as much as converting from files to desktop computer systems.

wvenable 4y ago

I'm not sure how they're measuring productivity. From my own experience as a software developer, I've seen how software makes individuals more productive. But the end result of this productivity is not 2x as much output overall but 0.5x as many people to achieve the same level of productivity. We're decreasing costs but maybe the market doesn't need 2x or 5x more productivity. There just isn't that kind of demand anywhere -- especially with fewer people working.

gumby 4y ago
"Productivity" means "amount of input required to get a given output." I think you might be thinking of "productivity" as a synonym for "output". Usually in economics the input is labor hours, but for example "energy intensity" is the productivity of how much energy a process uses. In the macroeconomic case it's GDP divided by total energy used, but some industries are more energy intensive than others -- they have lower productivity from their energy use. Thus 2X the output and same output with 1/2 the people are identical: both describe doubling productivity.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  > "Productivity" means "amount of input required to get a given output." I think you might be thinking of "productivity" as a synonym for "output". Okay but surely we're only talking about average productivity with some assumptions on the approximate employment rate and hours worked per week. No one is going to be impressed by a "5% increase in productivity" next year if unemployment rises to 99%, the 1% of remaining workers only work 10 hours per week, but the average hour yields 5% higher output than the previous year.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > Okay but surely we're only talking about average productivity with some assumptions on the approximate employment rate and hours worked per week. No. Productivity is simply output divided by some input factor. Employment rate, hours worked per week, wage: none are involved in that calculation (unless you're measuring productivity of the wage, i.e. COGS). > No one is going to be impressed by a "5% increase in productivity" next year if unemployment rises to 99%, the 1% of remaining workers only work 10 hours per week, but the average hour yields 5% higher output than the previous year. On the contrary, investors and managers will be very impressed by that.

ALittleLight 4y ago

I think the non-super rich see a lot of advantages from the modern economy. As an example, just yesterday, I was picking up an order at Walmart. The guy who brought the bags to my car had Airpods in. The existence of Airpods (and phones, Internet, Bluetooth, streaming services, etc) may not have made this guy more productive, but it probably improves his life somewhat.

tobr 4y ago
Am I missing something, or is this like the first time you see a guy with AirPods? What’s the significance?
- EarthLaunch 4y ago
  It’s that people working boring or unpleasant jobs can have an audio environment of their choice. Music, podcasts, audiobooks. This wasn’t possible when it required a huge device, but AirPods are so unobtrusive and socially acceptable that workers can wear them without it attracting undue attention. Pranksters on YouTube use it for the same reason; people are used to seeing it and don’t associate it with receiving voice instructions.
- kylecordes 4y ago
  One significant thing here: this is a piece of technology which no one in the entire world, at any level of wealth, had a couple decades ago. But today a person in a relatively low-ranked job carrying orders out at Walmart... casually has this technology for fun. This does not measure as a productivity improvement, but it’s pretty great. Most non-positional goods are like this. You getting Airpods doesn't make mine any worse. Statistically, you getting Airpods makes mine better, because it increases the chances of there being more content I like.
evan_ 4y ago
and when he gets home he can eat bread and watch the circus on his phone!
- 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

A massive CRM was possible in the early 90s on easily obtainable hardware. Earlier if you wanted to spend the money. It’s not immediately clear what Salesforce adds that literally couldn’t be done with 1995 tech.

throw8383833jj 4y ago

It sounds plausible: all the benefits have gone to the rich. So, I set out to see what a world would be like if we "redistributed" all those "benefits". So, simply take the entire wealth of every billionaire in the US and divide it by the number of citizens and number of years required to acquire that wealth. It's a relatively simply equation: Billionaire wealth / Citizens / 30 Years = Yearly Redistribution 4T / 300 M/ 30 = 500$ per year (not exactly life changing wealth) So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year. I have a different theorey. The US and other developed countries have been loosing ever greater amounts of wealth. Wealth per capita has decreased dramatically over the last 50 years. The causes are too numerous to go into, but there are MANY. *https://ips-dc.org/u-s-billionaire-wealth-surges-past-1-trillion-since-beginning-of-pandemic/ https://ips-dc.org/u-s-billionaire-wealth-surges-past-1-tril... At the end of the day, humans want simple solutions to simple problems and the "wealth going to the top" theorey is super easy to understand and super easy to solve. There's only one problem: it's not true. it's debunked now. The real problem of decreasing wealth is much harder to solve and has many causes

mbrameld 4y ago
> it's not true. it's debunked now Where has it been debunked?
dahart 4y ago
> So, if you stole every last dollar from every last billionaire in the US and redistributed it for the last 30 years, each person would only get 500$ per year. Loaded use of the world “stole” there. This is a faulty analysis. It’s well studied and well known, for example, that the top 10% of people income wise have ~70% of the wealth in the US. Similar patterns exist globally. This has been reproduced many ways by many people and squarely contradicts your calculation.
- throw8383833jj 4y ago
  "stole" or redistribute. the math works out the same in the end. the reason I used "stole" is because if you "redistribute" every ounce of someone's wealth, I imagine you might get some push back. You can re-apply this formula to various top N% but you get similar numbers: both for income redistribution and wealth redistribution. The reason all those articles of top 10% have 70% of the wealth seem so impressive is not because the top 10% have so much, it's because the rest of the 90% has so little. and so even a modest amount in the top 10% is much greater than the tiny bit the bottom 90 has.

DeWilde 4y ago

The gap between the richest and the poorest is probably the largest ever, but today people are also living far more comfortably than ever: electricity, heated water, food and water at a press of a button, generally good transportation to pretty much everywhere. What is lacking, for the less privileged, is mostly lack of access to affordable housing and a bad diet (arguably this is mostly due to the enticing nature of fast food and lack of education about how bad it is). Other than that the basic life necessities don't differ too wildly for the rich and the everyone who is not homeless.

pdimitar 4y ago
I believe it needs to also be said that bad diet is a side effect of everyone trying to produce with cheaper and cheaper materials. I shudder to think what kinds of ingredients are some of the foods I see in cheaper shops made from. This is not sustainable. It cannot last for that much longer IMO. Literally and metaphorically, people are getting sick of it. They notice. They are not dumb. They might be in denial (people just LOVE their chips and cola for some reason) but they are not dumb. I see more and more people in my neighborhood going to the local market and negotiating with vendors coming straight from agrarian villages for a "monthly subscription" of sorts -- you bring me one huge basket with fruits and veggies every weekend, I pay you, say, $200 a month. The vendor gets a stable income, you get actual bio food and don't have to pick and choose every tomato and parsley leaf every damn time. The vendors have a vested interest not to cheat their most stable and profitable customers. Sadly all these societal changes are glacially slow, giving the opportunists plenty of breathing room to swindle people and get rich for decades but oh well, until we develop collective consciousness it seems that this won't ever change... :|
tstrimple 4y ago
I think it's a little to easy to overlook the abject poverty which still exists in this country. More than two million Americans lack access to clean water or sanitation. I personally know millennials who didn't have hot water in their house growing up. They would heat water on the stove for baths, at least when their utilities were turned on. There exist towns where literal sewage is running out of people's houses in areas where kids play. Hookworm for example is still rampant in parts of the US. Half of our rivers and streams and one third of our lakes are too polluted to swim or fish in, much less drink from. 99% of households having a refrigerator doesn't mean these folk are living comfortably. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-lowndes-county-alabama-water-waste-treatment-poverty https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low... https://time.com/longform/clean-water-access-united-states/ https://time.com/longform/clean-water-access-united-states/

thewarrior 4y ago

Because software cannot produce resources just because it exists. Productivity refers to being able to actually manufacture more widgets and things like food, roads. Yes technology has made things cheaper. By moving things across the globe and creating a complex supply chain that can produce more goods for less energy and raw material input. But the per Capita availability of energy and minerals is a fundamental bottleneck that things like CRM software can only go so far in helping. The article talks about software that allows a call center employee to handle more customers better. This is great but how does something like this help society produce more heating and food which are currently in short supply ? It makes the company more profit and saves customers some money. But if they try to actually get more food it will cause inflation. I would highly encourage people to read the work of Vaclav Smil. In the grand scheme of things iPhones are irrelevant. Half the world depends on natural gas and ammonia fertilizer so they don't starve to death. We are living through the consequences of this as we speak. Software simply isn't on the scale of things like coal, oil, natural gas, electricity or even washing machines. Computers might be more like the printing press. Perhaps centuries from now we can look back and say what innovations came about due to multi century second order and third order effects. We in the industry have become lost in the world of bits and "productivity" in producing TikToks and targetting ads for mobile games doesn't help as much as we think towards supply. These are fundamentally ways of aggregating and coordinating demand. The problem is now on the supply side. We need software that runs on robots eliminating workers and working 24x7 doing things like mining, agriculture and warehouses. We also need eliminate middle men and deliver directly to the consumer. Beyond that we need fundamentally new energy sources. Software can help here but increasing digitization mainly creates fat middlemen who don't add as much productivity into the world as they take. Hence I think Chinas new approach to tech regulatuion that curtails middleman platforms and encourages startups on the supply side makes a lot of sense.

gowld 4y ago
Services are also productivity.
- thewarrior 4y ago
  Yes but only to an extent. We cannot have an economy only of rappers and influencers.

bennysomething 4y ago

Lost me at the bit about fud from rich people. I really doubt there is a conspiracy.

Aunche 4y ago

Of course regular people are seeing benefits to increased productivity. The question is whether these benefits are really benefits at all. The average adult spends over 12 hours a day consuming media [1]. It's worth noting that much of this is passive consumption like radio in the background, but active consumption is undeniably increasing as well, most notably smartphone usage. I think the problem is that the more optimized our society becomes, the less true the economic assumption of rational human behavior becomes. Google Maps, for example, saves me time looking at maps rather than doing browsing Hackernews. However, when I think about it rationally, I was no less happy spending a few minutes planning my route before a trip instead of browsing HN during that same time. [1] https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-nielsen-total-audience-report-august-2020/ https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-niels...

lkrubner 4y ago

“”””But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich”””” You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average. Total wealth is created by productivity and is then divided between labor and capital. Where labor unions are strong, more of the total wealth goes to labor, and where labor unions are weak, more of the total wealth goes to capital. It’s the total wealth per hour that has seen slow growth in recent decades. If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted. In the old days, an army of secretaries kept the world in order. Despite your intuitions, they did in fact have ways of quickly finding one file out of millions of files. And secretaries offered a flexibility that we’ve lost with computers. It is the loss of flexibility that causes computers to damage productivity.

makeitdouble 4y ago
> Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted. To note, in the olden days, mistakes written in your record or misinterpretations (e.g.took the wrong record from the cabinet) would just have been a fact of life and nobody might even notice. Ms Wilson and Ms Wiston just shouldn't have been in the same hospital at the same time. As you say everything was more flexible, more fuzzy. If you wanted the world to look orderly you'd quickly sweap under the rug the misaligned bits or disappear what you don't want there. This is also why you use cash and paper register if you need your restaurant's finances to look pristine on paper while still racking in money that doesn't need to be accounted.
njstraub608 4y ago
> If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted. I would argue this isn’t necessarily because of computers but a byproduct of an antiquated system and process being codified into a computer. The reason for this seems to be that there are structural inefficiencies built into our healthcare system that create a ton of added complexity that is near impossible to unwind because of legal (contractual and privacy-related) risks. For example, any attempts at improving efficiency in patient care creates potential liabilities for medical professionals. People are scared to innovate in this space, so the programs are just digital translations of an existing process. This requires a time investment to learn the “new way” of doing the same thing, and builds inherit laziness because steps are still require that should have been automated away. Medical notes are a good example of this; it’s required to be documented in an extremely specific way and of a certain length because of insurance so it just ends up being copy and pasted, free text, by the physician to meet this requirement.

drewcoo 4y ago

Consider bullshit jobs. Yes, there's "work" being done, so it's "productive," but is it really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

throw0101a 4y ago

> I have a hard time believing this thesis that modern technology doesn't help productivity. See Solow paradox: > The productivity paradox, also referred to as the Solow paradox, could refer either to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s despite rapid development in the field of information technology (IT) over the same period, or to the slowdown in productivity growth in the United States and developed countries from the 2000s to 2020s; sometimes the newer slowdown is referred to as the productivity slowdown, the productivity puzzle, or the productivity paradox 2.0. The 1970s to 1980s productivity paradox inspired many research efforts at explaining the slowdown, only for the paradox to disappear with renewed productivity growth in the developed countries in the 1990s. However, issues raised by those research efforts remain important in the study of productivity growth in general, and became important again when productivity growth slowed around the world again from the 2000s to the present day. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

mikewarot 4y ago

>Could you imagine having to go through hundreds of filing cabinets and massive systems just to get information about a customer? Yes, things are much faster now. But having to manually scan an entire office of files sequentially was never a thing. The files were alphabetized, indexed, collated. Clerks knew what they were doing. In digging through my home state of Indiana's Marriage records, they had an ingenious system that did a fair bit of error correction and sped up retrieval of information by orders of magnitude. This system goes back to the 1800s, consists of an index, and sequentially recorded Marriage Licenses, bound in the same book. Entries were indexed by both the groom and brides last name, which meant in most cases, you could recover from a single error. Worst case, you had to scan that one book for the County, for that year, or fraction thereof. If you knew the date, that made it much faster as well.

mikewarot 4y ago

Richard Nixon had a plan for dealing with this, but changed his mind at the last second. [1] 1 - https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-president-nixon-and-his-basic-income-bill/173117835-c34d6145 https://thecorrespondent.com/4503/the-bizarre-tale-of-presid...

kylecordes 4y ago

Where did all the productivity benefits go? The answer is probably: to competition. If one company got CRM, wow, huge productivity boost! They would sell so much more per unit of salesperson labor input. But it's a competitive world, so a lot of companies get CRM. The additional sales productivity gets competed back out; perhaps with the recipients of sales efforts (who now have a large increase in the amount of incoming contacts) losing/wasting as much productivity in aggregate as the companies using the software have gained. The same dynamic applies to many other areas. Not to all areas of course; there are also real massive, long term benefits to productivity. Famously it used to take over half of all human effort just to keep us fed. It doesn’t anymore.

iskander 4y ago

Medical record digitization seems to have had a neutral-to-negative impact on hospital efficiency. It's hard to believe since the alternative sounds mind-numbingly inefficient but there are tons of low-tech streamlined processes (like having a whiteboard in each patient's room) which are being undermined by having a constellation of disconnected staff all dumping information into Epic and not having time to read other entries.