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Ooooh, this is a pet peeve of mine! The productivity measure in economics is only tangentially related to how hard people work. Consider this, productivity is d
by jgilias 4y ago
Ooooh, this is a pet peeve of mine! The productivity measure in economics is only tangentially related to how hard people work. Consider this, productivity is defined as the sum total of goods and services produced divided by total hours worked. If a company is highly automated, productivity will be higher than for a company in the same domain that is less automated. This has nothing to do with how hard employees work at either company.
Also, if the sum total of goods and services produced by an industry is not tightly coupled to hours worked, productivity will just fall with falling sales. So, if Google sells less of their GSuite subscriptions, but doesn’t do layoffs, productivity will fall. And this has very little to do with how hard individual Google employees work.
- WalterBright 4y agoThe Labor Theory of Value is discredited. Value is not based on how hard or long someone works, it's what is produced by the labor that has value. For example, if you fill a bucket with water, run around in a circle, and empty the bucket, you are surely working hard, but exhibit zero productivity.
- VancouverMan 4y agoWhat's even worse for an economy is when "work" results in negative productivity. Government bureaucrats are often an example of this. The "work" they do too often involves impeding productive private sector workers/organizations in some way. Not only are these impeded private sector workers/organizations not doing their real work, but they're expending resources dealing with something that's usually quite irrelevant. That's on top of the tax burden they already face, which is being used to fund the bureaucrats that make these tax-payers less productive. In the end, thanks to the "work" of government bureaucrats, less real wealth has been generated than otherwise would have been.