8 ms·

Computers Reduce Efficiency: Case Studies of the Solow Paradox (2023)

97 points by gtt 2y ago

nitwit005 2y ago
Case studies from the 80s, as productivity started improving again in the 90s. I can actually remember Alan Greenspan discussing this, despite how young I was.
- Manfred 2y ago
  To be precise, the first study mentioned is from 2011, then 1989, 1987, then studies done in the 1990's.
geysersam 2y ago
Nobody can convince me computerization has not improved efficiency in industrial manufacturing. But computerization has probably lead to fewer people working in manufacturing. Did overall efficiency decrease or increase?
- pydry 2y ago
  Offshoring did 90% of that, not computers. The effect of computerization was just to keep some industrial production at home - mostly the unique kind of manufacturing where labor costs weren't dominant. I think the US is in for an epic shock in few years time when they realize just how much getting cut off from Chinese factories will hurt. Either demand for labor to substitute those Chinese factories will spike or the US will economically spiral as inflation takes off like a rocket and US elites try yet again to shift the burden onto the politically impotent working classes.
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    I don't think so. We have major domestic and on-shoring efforts taking place and a massive pool of migrants to draw from for cheap labor in addition to low cost collaborations with Mexico. The cost of trashy consumer goods might spike but the market would quickly supply alternatives for manufacture of important goods.
    - pydry 2y ago
      Everything you said would all be absolutely true if we reversed course some time between 2008 and 2017.
TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago
What's with a lot of the mentions of “computer” using what looks like a portmanteau with “retard”?! I know some famous people like Stallman do this, but I don't think it's perceived positively.
- eru 2y ago
  Well, Stallman ain't perceived positively, either. The author clearly has an axe to grind. I haven't read enough yet to decide whether they have valid point.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    I couldn’t decide whether they had a valid point or whether they were engaging in some form of parody. Seems like an extreme case of Poe’s Law.
    - GTP 2y ago
      I think that if you filter-out the exaggerations in the article, the general message is still worth to reflect on. Some process doesn't get more efficient just by virtue of using a computer, and many tools we have now are more about good-looking interfaces than actual productivity.
      - datavirtue 2y ago
        This.
      - rbanffy 2y ago
        Not only that, but a lot of the efficiency gains are directed towards tasks that, otherwise, would not be done because it wasn’t worth the cost. Now that the cost is low enough, their marginal gains absorb the resources that’s be freed by automation. That’s the origin of so-called “bullshit jobs”.
      - SiempreViernes 2y ago
        Sure, every fable has a grain of truth, but constantcrying put it more usefully here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40264453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40264453 The OP is not worth reading unless you desperately miss the "ironic" invective laden writing of the early 00's.
flavaz 2y ago
A classic example of this would be how some roles require endless spreadsheets, or individual updates to a CRM tool like Pipedrive. CRM tools add a lot of overhead to what should be a simple process- letting your manager know what you’re up to.
- onthecanposting 2y ago
  If that bookkeeping overhead is fed into analysis and process mining to drive improvement, it might be a net gain. More often though, I see yet-another-spreadhseet applied as panacea, then it's forgotten in a few months and the process repeats over many years.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    That is being fed into analysis and process mining. But nobody's doing the meta-analysis to look at the overhead of all the analysis tools, and see whether they are a net win.
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      Big Analysis doesn't want you to think about that. That is one of the points of the article though: If you double productivity of the worker, but require a second worker to maintain the computer/do the analysis, have you really increased productivity? The answer is yes, but it's important to think about the shape of your work contact patch and how increased productivity increases value.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  Good to know sales people have their own version of JIRA hell.
- pnut 2y ago
  I'm not a CRM end user, but I'd be very grateful for such a tool if I had to suddenly cover for a coworker, or inherit an existing business relationship. What is the alternative, each person individually cobbles together some godawful workflow management system? With no centralised repository of information? Totally unsustainable, and not at all related to keeping your manager informed.
gieksosz 2y ago
At first I thought it was written in the 80ies, then I saw the author mention 1995 and it began to feel very strange that someone from the mid 90ies would rant against computers. Then I reached a section about LLM …
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
virtue3 2y ago
I think this article is drastically downplaying how dramatically more complicated designs and things are now than they were before. I don't believe it's computers that are to blame; I believe it's complexity nightmare problem. We have much tighter tolerances for everything now; everything "does more" and relies on my components. Back when we used pen and paper to create military vehicles it was mostly JUST about performance and completing the objective. There wasn't thousands upon thousands of other requirements and features (whether or not this is a good thing is debatable).
- rini17 2y ago
  And what about financial services mentioned in the articles? Doubt that "everything does more" there.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    The referenced article is mainly about about capital efficiency from introducing computers which isn't so surprising as it needs time to (figure out how to) use them effectively. Nowadays, handling payments, compliance, risk management, trading etc. without computers would be impossible. What is true is that a fair amount of productivity is absorbed on compliance and control issues, though.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    Oh yeah, also some parts have cancer. Tumors can take a lot to maintain.
  - pas 2y ago
    Financial services went from a solid base of institutionalized racism (redlining) and casual prejudice based risk profiling when you went to the branch office ... to credit scores and financial engineering (2008 hello!) and introducing a thousand useless intermediaries, global 0-24 trading and investing, online Regulation A+ offerings (pre-IPO investing for nonaccredited investors), and online banking. It's a lot more, of course, and there are even a few advantages.
- hulitu 2y ago
spit2wind 2y ago
Nice meta analysis examining the situation from the perspective management versus measurement: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4801131_Measurement_or_Management_Revisiting_the_Productivity_Paradox_of_Information_Technology https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4801131_Measurement...
hcks 2y ago
“Computa*” this is insane
Samtidsfobiker 2y ago
I too have wondered why it take so long to make stuff in CAD, and why even suggesting that everything should fit together the first time is laughable at best. My theory is that computers can't do rough sketching. No CAD software suite (I think) can iterate and evalute rough ideas as fast and flexible as whiteboard pen in a meeting room can.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  That's the way I see it. Just as an example I am familiar with: so many people appear to begin a project like a MAME cabinet with SketchUp. I like "Cardboard Assisted Design" and have literally built several MAME cabinet prototypes in cardboard where iteration is easy with merely a box-cutter knife. When the ergonomics and part-fitting is "go", I take measurements from the cardboard proto and move to wood. Designing acrylic parts for later laser-cutting I have also used "CAD" for prototyping — sometimes even flat-bed scanning the chipboard prototype and then moving to a vector drawing app to overlay the laser-friendly beziers. Even for PCB layout I often will laser-print the PCB as a final sanity check: punching holes in the paper and shoving the actual electronic components in to see that everything will fit before I send the file off to Taiwan.
- nurple 2y ago
  Your theory seems sound. I see this theme of free-flow expressivity vs stricture and formalism in the choice of programming languages. CAD is like rust, where it never fits together the first time and parametric stricture lines the road of progress with infinite caltrops in abdication to correctness; javascript is a sketch book where ideas and mutations happen easily and often, correctness is a beautiful illusion brought through the evolutionary nature of experimentation.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Mechanical CADs aren't designed for maintainability. They are designed for expressivity first, and easiness of learning (for people with industry knowledge) second. And those are the two only goals. Just try to adapt a mechanical design for a slightly different task. It's usually better to start from scratch. (Anyway, that's an example of computers not being fully used. Going from the Solow paradox into "computers are bad" - like lots of people like to do, even here - is just stupid.)
joeatwork 2y ago
Something this article leaves out is that mostly, when people are given better tools, they don’t just produce more widgets per unit time: often instead they build different (more complex, better) widgets. When I was in school I read a study about this - a design shop had N draftsmen, they introduced CAD tools anticipating reducing the staff, and when researchers went back to the shop they had the same staff, but they were designing things that wouldn’t have been practical or possible before.
paulsutter 2y ago
SpaceX Raptor engine was designed using a full engine combustion simulator, without which the engine would have been impossible [1]. Not to mention the rapid evolution from Raptor 1 to 3 [2] Jet aircraft are 70% more efficient since 1967, largely from simulation [3], similar in automotive Unclear how the NVIDIA H100 would have been designed by hand-drawing 80 billion transistors Net-net: Computers necessary, but we need much better UIs and systems. Maybe AI will help us improve this [1] https://youtu.be/vYA0f6R5KAI?si=SG1vLMMl8l3DuCYN https://youtu.be/vYA0f6R5KAI?si=SG1vLMMl8l3DuCYN [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/04/spacex-raptor-3-engine-will-not-need-a-heat-shield-for-high-thrust-to-weight-ratio.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/04/spacex-raptor-3-engine... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft > Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes.
constantcrying 2y ago
It definitely is true that a design which could easily be created by hand is harder to create on a computer. The things where computers shine are actually managimg the complexity of a large and complicated systems. What I think the article leaves unspoken (but implied) is the "curse of tools", if you give a person tools he is likely to use them, even if they might not be applicable. Meaning that someone might decide to create a complex solution to a problem, simply because the tools he has been given allow him to do so. I think it is always very important to keep in mind what has been achieved with the very limited tools of the past and the immense ingenuity of the people who worked within those limits.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dimask 2y ago
  > The things where computers shine are actually managimg the complexity of a large and complicated systems. I would argue that where computers shine, firstmost, is automating repeated tasks. Even if a task is fairly simple in complexity and doing it by hand takes less time, if you have to repeat the same task over and over it may be beneficial to use computer tools that allow some automation, even if in the first couple of runs this is gonna take more time. In this sense, something being easier to do by hand (once) does not necessarily imply that it is better to do it by hand. But I do agree that an increase in complexity comes as a curse of tools. People with less tech-understanding may be more easy to get what some benefits of such tools are, but the problems that increased complexity brings takes longer to catch them.
- api 2y ago
  The curse of tools applies in computing too. A virtue of languages like Go is that they reduce incidental and gratuitous complexity through the simplicity of the language. A complex language with a powerful type system like Rust or C++ will tempt programmers to use every facet of the language and create baroque overly complex code.
  - chiggsy 2y ago
matheweis 2y ago
There are at least two dimensions to this that I believe that the author has overlooked: 1. Economies of scale. It may be that drafting something up in CAD takes more cycles to get right up front, but once you have an established design it is much easier to reproduce it by orders of magnitude 2. Changes in software. Software companies are ever changing their interfaces, decreasing productivity every time their users encounter this learning curve.
- pas 2y ago
  And CAD models benefit from better technology "for free", better visualization, better heuristics (for rule/code/safety/conformance checking), and so on. Did it make sense for military nuclear submarines back then? Well, maybe not, who knows. (Submarines are definitely not mass produced.) But what this 'insightful essay' ignores is that productivity decreased overall in the 'West' (as the post-WWII boom ended) but then picked up right around the dot-fucking-com boom. Oh, wait computers. But maybe this glorified shitpost should have used recent datasets instead of spending its eruditeness budget on extra spicy and fancy words. (propitiate!) https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/mckinsey%20global%20institute/our%20research/rekindling%20us%20productivity%20for%20a%20new%20era/mgi-us-productivity-web-exhibit-1.svgz?cq=50&cpy=Center https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/mckinsey%20global%... https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg/public/image/FromMay2014/gordon29augfig1.png?itok=Cutr4gI3 https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg... https://www.caixabankresearch.com/sites/default/files/styles/destacado_imagen_importada/public/content/image/2018/02/im_1802_d2_01_en_fmt.png?itok=JLZyWy3L https://www.caixabankresearch.com/sites/default/files/styles...
dopylitty 2y ago
For similar reasons to those mentioned in the article it's possible the past century will be seen as a dark age by future humans. Computers are incredibly fragile and depend on complex systems (eg the electricity grid) to even operate. They also can't persist data even across several decades reliably. Yet we've created a society where nothing can be done without a computer and all our data is stored in computers instead of physically. When those complex systems fail and the computers stop working we'll be left without any traces of the knowledge generated in the past century or the people who generated it. We'll also have lost all the previous knowledge that was moved from physical to digital storage. All future humans will see from the century is a whole lot of microplastics.
- ratsmack 2y ago
  The problem is that complex systems have not made us more knowledgeable and capable, but instead they have become a crutch. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont...
  - chiggsy 2y ago
    >By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Lot of this kind of stuff. Thesis summarized is that America is going to hell in a handbasket because the Feds are demanding that black people get hired once in a blue moon, a practice which dilutes meritocracy, according to the author. Heh. >When this was not enough, MIT increased its gender diversity by simply offering jobs to previously rejected female candidates. While no university will admit to letting standards slip for the sake of diversity, no one has offered a serious argument why the new processes produce higher or even equivalent quality faculty as opposed to simply more diverse faculty. Ah, MIT now pumping out dumb blondes, are they? Having encountered such people as the author of this piece several times before,I have to wonder about the "meritocracy" process in place prior. So "merit" correlates positively with sunscreen purchases, and inversely to tampon expenditure, does it? >This effect was likely seen in a recent paper by McDonald, Keeves, and Westphal. The paper points out that white male senior leaders reduce their engagement following the appointment of a minority CEO. While it is possible that author Ijeoma Oluo is correct, and that white men have so much unconscious bias raging inside of them that the appointment of a diverse CEO sends them into a tailspin of resentment, there is another more plausible explanation. When boards choose diverse CEOs to make a political statement, high performers who see an organization shifting away from valuing honest performance respond by disengaging. I mean... is there an actual difference here? First, I'm not convinced it's unconscious bias. Second, this "disengagement" certainly seems like the kind of "meritocracy" we have sadly grown quite familiar with. >The problem is that complex systems have not made us more knowledgeable and capable, but instead they have become a crutch. This article kind of sounds like some people want the old crutch back. There is a non trivial question of your fitness for this, however. In the 50's the rise of psychotherapy made it quite clear that people were cracking under the strain of delivering "merit." I'm quite delighted that this is such a concern to you people. Excellent.
cushychicken 2y ago
Something tells me this guy is one of those people who thinks version control is a newfangled process step and not a useful piece of a development cycle.
fukceverything 2y ago
[dead]
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
I build architectures for major systems and in every case I start with a blank paper in a Strathmore 400series Sketchbook About 4 years ago I made a wall of my office into a chalkboard and that’s been where I work out massively complex interdependencies and data workflows Nothing on a computer remotely compares to the speed and specificity of pen or chalk in hand
- Almondsetat 2y ago
  Except a tablet with pen support
  - AndrewKemendo 2y ago
    Not even close. That can break and isn’t perfectly 100% available like my analog method and has much less transportability
courseofaction 2y ago
There are better explanations for the general downturn of productivity despite better tools: Increased focus on extraction since the expansion of neoliberal policies in the 70s. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
rdlecler1 2y ago
This analysis ignores the impact of competition. A car produced today is better (and more complex to make) than a car produced in 1980. Technological productivity isn’t just about improving the number of units or dollar value produced/hours input. Technology can make products more competitive without any increase in productivity by making them better, and, therefore more attractive, to customers even if unit cost or volume stays fixed.
- beretguy 2y ago
  I don’t know. We need to define “better” first. My friend has 1970s F150 that still drives. “For how long will car run so that i don’t have to buy a new one” - that’s my definition of “better”. Will modern cars run 50 years from now?
  - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
    Modern cars seem to be vastly more reliable than even cars from the 90s. They also generally have nicer features
  - dahart 2y ago
    Car longevity has been increasing over time [1], despite anecdotes of a few long-lived vehicles here and there. So, cars are getting better by your metric. They’re also getting better by all other metrics: safety, fuel economy, speed, reliability, conveniences, comfort, style, etc., etc. I’ve driven a still-running 70’s F-150 recently and owned a 2020s F-150 for a year. There is practically no comparison, I would never buy the 70s vehicle given the choice, they are worlds apart. The 70s truck is uncomfortable, slow, and unsafe in today’s traffic. It is also temperamental and requires more maintenance, cold in the cabin in the winter, hard to see when it’s raining or snowing. Probably the only thing I could say honestly about the 70s truck that’s better in any way is that the purchase price was lower. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity#Statistics
  - hvs 2y ago
    The vehicles still running from the 1970's suffer from survivorship bias.
smeej 2y ago
I'm noticing a version of this as I pilot switching to a handwritten bullet journal for task management. I'll still sit down at the computer to brainstorm and organize the tasks of my projects, because being able to move list items around is a huge advantage, but when it actually comes to doing the darn things? It's been so much more effective to track them in the notebook. Planning out my daily schedule, figuring out what I can do in which timeframe, and making sure things don't fall through the cracks has worked so much better on paper.
dahart 2y ago
The financial services industry has been revolutionized by computers, I have no idea why the author thought that would make a good example. Today’s stock markets & high frequency trading & online banks & international finance didn’t (and can’t) even exist without computers. The explosion of personal investing and day trading that has changed trading doesn’t exist without computers. The entire computer industry itself has accelerated and grown because of computers, nowhere has he accounted for the “productivity” attributed to sales of computers. Fields I’ve worked in, video games and CG films, have absolutely increased efficiency with computers: for equal sized productions, the quality has gone up and the workforce needed has gone down over time consistently for decades. The article has only one single and completely vague datapoint that includes anything from the last 30 years, that’s a major red flag. The invective portmanteaus and insult words are also a red flag and very weak argumentation. Is that supposed to make up for the complete lack of any relevant data? Not to mention some of the insults are worse than iffy by todays standards and don’t reflect well on the author. Call me rather unconvinced, I guess.
- superfunny 2y ago
  Agreed - I was very surprised to hear this. From Dividend.com: "In the late 1960s, the volume of trading activity increased dramatically. With the drastic increase in volume, the NYSE had $4 billion in unprocessed transactions by 1968. To catch up, the exchange closed every Wednesday from June 12, 1968 to December 31, 1968. During this crisis, over 100 brokers failed due to the high volume of transaction that could not be processed." Today, the NYSE processes trading volumes of 3-4 billion shares per day.
Nevermark 2y ago
Under appreciated: Automation creates, or dramatically enhances, the need to fully understand problems and solutions at the most detailed and practical levels. Because automation removes the valuable manual ad hoc flexibility to adapt to most wonkiness. 1. When a job requires a mix of human and computer work, productivity changes are very dependent on interface details. Even one slightly confusing GUI, slowness of feedback, a tool that isn't quite as flexible as a job needs, or an inability to see/edit/use related information at the same time, can greatly harm productivity. 2. When a job is completely automated, productivity can go way up. But this productivity doesn't get attributed to human workers, it is corporate productivity. And then only if this highly optimized task really provides value. There is a lot of performative information processing, with conjectured long term payoffs, serving the needs of management and tech workers to look busy, and believe they are valuable. For both human and corporate productivity, automation makes it extremely easy to decrease productivity due to the most subtle mismatches between problems and solutions. When work is done by hand, these mismatches tend to be glaringly obvious, less tolerated, and more easily mitigated or eliminated.
sobellian 2y ago
Am I nuts, or does the first graph show exactly the opposite of his claim? He says it shows declining productivity, but labor productivity rises. Costs also rise but this is exactly what one should expect from labor-saving devices, no?

97 points by gtt 2y ago

Case studies from the 80s, as productivity started improving again in the 90s. I can actually remember Alan Greenspan discussing this, despite how young I was.

Manfred 2y ago
To be precise, the first study mentioned is from 2011, then 1989, 1987, then studies done in the 1990's.

geysersam 2y ago

Nobody can convince me computerization has not improved efficiency in industrial manufacturing. But computerization has probably lead to fewer people working in manufacturing. Did overall efficiency decrease or increase?

pydry 2y ago
Offshoring did 90% of that, not computers. The effect of computerization was just to keep some industrial production at home - mostly the unique kind of manufacturing where labor costs weren't dominant. I think the US is in for an epic shock in few years time when they realize just how much getting cut off from Chinese factories will hurt. Either demand for labor to substitute those Chinese factories will spike or the US will economically spiral as inflation takes off like a rocket and US elites try yet again to shift the burden onto the politically impotent working classes.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  I don't think so. We have major domestic and on-shoring efforts taking place and a massive pool of migrants to draw from for cheap labor in addition to low cost collaborations with Mexico. The cost of trashy consumer goods might spike but the market would quickly supply alternatives for manufacture of important goods.
  - pydry 2y ago
    Everything you said would all be absolutely true if we reversed course some time between 2008 and 2017.

TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago

What's with a lot of the mentions of “computer” using what looks like a portmanteau with “retard”?! I know some famous people like Stallman do this, but I don't think it's perceived positively.

eru 2y ago
Well, Stallman ain't perceived positively, either. The author clearly has an axe to grind. I haven't read enough yet to decide whether they have valid point.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  I couldn’t decide whether they had a valid point or whether they were engaging in some form of parody. Seems like an extreme case of Poe’s Law.
  - GTP 2y ago
    I think that if you filter-out the exaggerations in the article, the general message is still worth to reflect on. Some process doesn't get more efficient just by virtue of using a computer, and many tools we have now are more about good-looking interfaces than actual productivity.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      This.
    - rbanffy 2y ago
      Not only that, but a lot of the efficiency gains are directed towards tasks that, otherwise, would not be done because it wasn’t worth the cost. Now that the cost is low enough, their marginal gains absorb the resources that’s be freed by automation. That’s the origin of so-called “bullshit jobs”.
    - SiempreViernes 2y ago
      Sure, every fable has a grain of truth, but constantcrying put it more usefully here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40264453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40264453 The OP is not worth reading unless you desperately miss the "ironic" invective laden writing of the early 00's.

flavaz 2y ago

A classic example of this would be how some roles require endless spreadsheets, or individual updates to a CRM tool like Pipedrive. CRM tools add a lot of overhead to what should be a simple process- letting your manager know what you’re up to.

onthecanposting 2y ago
If that bookkeeping overhead is fed into analysis and process mining to drive improvement, it might be a net gain. More often though, I see yet-another-spreadhseet applied as panacea, then it's forgotten in a few months and the process repeats over many years.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  That is being fed into analysis and process mining. But nobody's doing the meta-analysis to look at the overhead of all the analysis tools, and see whether they are a net win.
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    Big Analysis doesn't want you to think about that. That is one of the points of the article though: If you double productivity of the worker, but require a second worker to maintain the computer/do the analysis, have you really increased productivity? The answer is yes, but it's important to think about the shape of your work contact patch and how increased productivity increases value.
ElevenLathe 2y ago
Good to know sales people have their own version of JIRA hell.
pnut 2y ago
I'm not a CRM end user, but I'd be very grateful for such a tool if I had to suddenly cover for a coworker, or inherit an existing business relationship. What is the alternative, each person individually cobbles together some godawful workflow management system? With no centralised repository of information? Totally unsustainable, and not at all related to keeping your manager informed.

gieksosz 2y ago

At first I thought it was written in the 80ies, then I saw the author mention 1995 and it began to feel very strange that someone from the mid 90ies would rant against computers. Then I reached a section about LLM …

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

virtue3 2y ago

I think this article is drastically downplaying how dramatically more complicated designs and things are now than they were before. I don't believe it's computers that are to blame; I believe it's complexity nightmare problem. We have much tighter tolerances for everything now; everything "does more" and relies on my components. Back when we used pen and paper to create military vehicles it was mostly JUST about performance and completing the objective. There wasn't thousands upon thousands of other requirements and features (whether or not this is a good thing is debatable).

rini17 2y ago
And what about financial services mentioned in the articles? Doubt that "everything does more" there.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  The referenced article is mainly about about capital efficiency from introducing computers which isn't so surprising as it needs time to (figure out how to) use them effectively. Nowadays, handling payments, compliance, risk management, trading etc. without computers would be impossible. What is true is that a fair amount of productivity is absorbed on compliance and control issues, though.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  Oh yeah, also some parts have cancer. Tumors can take a lot to maintain.
- pas 2y ago
  Financial services went from a solid base of institutionalized racism (redlining) and casual prejudice based risk profiling when you went to the branch office ... to credit scores and financial engineering (2008 hello!) and introducing a thousand useless intermediaries, global 0-24 trading and investing, online Regulation A+ offerings (pre-IPO investing for nonaccredited investors), and online banking. It's a lot more, of course, and there are even a few advantages.
hulitu 2y ago

spit2wind 2y ago

Nice meta analysis examining the situation from the perspective management versus measurement: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4801131_Measurement_or_Management_Revisiting_the_Productivity_Paradox_of_Information_Technology https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4801131_Measurement...

hcks 2y ago

“Computa*” this is insane

Samtidsfobiker 2y ago

I too have wondered why it take so long to make stuff in CAD, and why even suggesting that everything should fit together the first time is laughable at best. My theory is that computers can't do rough sketching. No CAD software suite (I think) can iterate and evalute rough ideas as fast and flexible as whiteboard pen in a meeting room can.

JKCalhoun 2y ago
That's the way I see it. Just as an example I am familiar with: so many people appear to begin a project like a MAME cabinet with SketchUp. I like "Cardboard Assisted Design" and have literally built several MAME cabinet prototypes in cardboard where iteration is easy with merely a box-cutter knife. When the ergonomics and part-fitting is "go", I take measurements from the cardboard proto and move to wood. Designing acrylic parts for later laser-cutting I have also used "CAD" for prototyping — sometimes even flat-bed scanning the chipboard prototype and then moving to a vector drawing app to overlay the laser-friendly beziers. Even for PCB layout I often will laser-print the PCB as a final sanity check: punching holes in the paper and shoving the actual electronic components in to see that everything will fit before I send the file off to Taiwan.
nurple 2y ago
Your theory seems sound. I see this theme of free-flow expressivity vs stricture and formalism in the choice of programming languages. CAD is like rust, where it never fits together the first time and parametric stricture lines the road of progress with infinite caltrops in abdication to correctness; javascript is a sketch book where ideas and mutations happen easily and often, correctness is a beautiful illusion brought through the evolutionary nature of experimentation.
marcosdumay 2y ago
Mechanical CADs aren't designed for maintainability. They are designed for expressivity first, and easiness of learning (for people with industry knowledge) second. And those are the two only goals. Just try to adapt a mechanical design for a slightly different task. It's usually better to start from scratch. (Anyway, that's an example of computers not being fully used. Going from the Solow paradox into "computers are bad" - like lots of people like to do, even here - is just stupid.)

joeatwork 2y ago

Something this article leaves out is that mostly, when people are given better tools, they don’t just produce more widgets per unit time: often instead they build different (more complex, better) widgets. When I was in school I read a study about this - a design shop had N draftsmen, they introduced CAD tools anticipating reducing the staff, and when researchers went back to the shop they had the same staff, but they were designing things that wouldn’t have been practical or possible before.

paulsutter 2y ago

SpaceX Raptor engine was designed using a full engine combustion simulator, without which the engine would have been impossible [1]. Not to mention the rapid evolution from Raptor 1 to 3 [2] Jet aircraft are 70% more efficient since 1967, largely from simulation [3], similar in automotive Unclear how the NVIDIA H100 would have been designed by hand-drawing 80 billion transistors Net-net: Computers necessary, but we need much better UIs and systems. Maybe AI will help us improve this [1] https://youtu.be/vYA0f6R5KAI?si=SG1vLMMl8l3DuCYN https://youtu.be/vYA0f6R5KAI?si=SG1vLMMl8l3DuCYN [2] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/04/spacex-raptor-3-engine-will-not-need-a-heat-shield-for-high-thrust-to-weight-ratio.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/04/spacex-raptor-3-engine... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft > Jet airliners became 70% more fuel efficient between 1967 and 2007, 40% due to improvements in engine efficiency and 30% from airframes.

constantcrying 2y ago

It definitely is true that a design which could easily be created by hand is harder to create on a computer. The things where computers shine are actually managimg the complexity of a large and complicated systems. What I think the article leaves unspoken (but implied) is the "curse of tools", if you give a person tools he is likely to use them, even if they might not be applicable. Meaning that someone might decide to create a complex solution to a problem, simply because the tools he has been given allow him to do so. I think it is always very important to keep in mind what has been achieved with the very limited tools of the past and the immense ingenuity of the people who worked within those limits.

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dimask 2y ago
> The things where computers shine are actually managimg the complexity of a large and complicated systems. I would argue that where computers shine, firstmost, is automating repeated tasks. Even if a task is fairly simple in complexity and doing it by hand takes less time, if you have to repeat the same task over and over it may be beneficial to use computer tools that allow some automation, even if in the first couple of runs this is gonna take more time. In this sense, something being easier to do by hand (once) does not necessarily imply that it is better to do it by hand. But I do agree that an increase in complexity comes as a curse of tools. People with less tech-understanding may be more easy to get what some benefits of such tools are, but the problems that increased complexity brings takes longer to catch them.
api 2y ago
The curse of tools applies in computing too. A virtue of languages like Go is that they reduce incidental and gratuitous complexity through the simplicity of the language. A complex language with a powerful type system like Rust or C++ will tempt programmers to use every facet of the language and create baroque overly complex code.
- chiggsy 2y ago

matheweis 2y ago

There are at least two dimensions to this that I believe that the author has overlooked: 1. Economies of scale. It may be that drafting something up in CAD takes more cycles to get right up front, but once you have an established design it is much easier to reproduce it by orders of magnitude 2. Changes in software. Software companies are ever changing their interfaces, decreasing productivity every time their users encounter this learning curve.

pas 2y ago
And CAD models benefit from better technology "for free", better visualization, better heuristics (for rule/code/safety/conformance checking), and so on. Did it make sense for military nuclear submarines back then? Well, maybe not, who knows. (Submarines are definitely not mass produced.) But what this 'insightful essay' ignores is that productivity decreased overall in the 'West' (as the post-WWII boom ended) but then picked up right around the dot-fucking-com boom. Oh, wait computers. But maybe this glorified shitpost should have used recent datasets instead of spending its eruditeness budget on extra spicy and fancy words. (propitiate!) https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/mckinsey%20global%20institute/our%20research/rekindling%20us%20productivity%20for%20a%20new%20era/mgi-us-productivity-web-exhibit-1.svgz?cq=50&cpy=Center https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/mckinsey%20global%... https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg/public/image/FromMay2014/gordon29augfig1.png?itok=Cutr4gI3 https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg... https://www.caixabankresearch.com/sites/default/files/styles/destacado_imagen_importada/public/content/image/2018/02/im_1802_d2_01_en_fmt.png?itok=JLZyWy3L https://www.caixabankresearch.com/sites/default/files/styles...

dopylitty 2y ago

For similar reasons to those mentioned in the article it's possible the past century will be seen as a dark age by future humans. Computers are incredibly fragile and depend on complex systems (eg the electricity grid) to even operate. They also can't persist data even across several decades reliably. Yet we've created a society where nothing can be done without a computer and all our data is stored in computers instead of physically. When those complex systems fail and the computers stop working we'll be left without any traces of the knowledge generated in the past century or the people who generated it. We'll also have lost all the previous knowledge that was moved from physical to digital storage. All future humans will see from the century is a whole lot of microplastics.

ratsmack 2y ago
The problem is that complex systems have not made us more knowledgeable and capable, but instead they have become a crutch. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont...
- chiggsy 2y ago
  >By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Lot of this kind of stuff. Thesis summarized is that America is going to hell in a handbasket because the Feds are demanding that black people get hired once in a blue moon, a practice which dilutes meritocracy, according to the author. Heh. >When this was not enough, MIT increased its gender diversity by simply offering jobs to previously rejected female candidates. While no university will admit to letting standards slip for the sake of diversity, no one has offered a serious argument why the new processes produce higher or even equivalent quality faculty as opposed to simply more diverse faculty. Ah, MIT now pumping out dumb blondes, are they? Having encountered such people as the author of this piece several times before,I have to wonder about the "meritocracy" process in place prior. So "merit" correlates positively with sunscreen purchases, and inversely to tampon expenditure, does it? >This effect was likely seen in a recent paper by McDonald, Keeves, and Westphal. The paper points out that white male senior leaders reduce their engagement following the appointment of a minority CEO. While it is possible that author Ijeoma Oluo is correct, and that white men have so much unconscious bias raging inside of them that the appointment of a diverse CEO sends them into a tailspin of resentment, there is another more plausible explanation. When boards choose diverse CEOs to make a political statement, high performers who see an organization shifting away from valuing honest performance respond by disengaging. I mean... is there an actual difference here? First, I'm not convinced it's unconscious bias. Second, this "disengagement" certainly seems like the kind of "meritocracy" we have sadly grown quite familiar with. >The problem is that complex systems have not made us more knowledgeable and capable, but instead they have become a crutch. This article kind of sounds like some people want the old crutch back. There is a non trivial question of your fitness for this, however. In the 50's the rise of psychotherapy made it quite clear that people were cracking under the strain of delivering "merit." I'm quite delighted that this is such a concern to you people. Excellent.

cushychicken 2y ago

Something tells me this guy is one of those people who thinks version control is a newfangled process step and not a useful piece of a development cycle.

fukceverything 2y ago

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AndrewKemendo 2y ago

I build architectures for major systems and in every case I start with a blank paper in a Strathmore 400series Sketchbook About 4 years ago I made a wall of my office into a chalkboard and that’s been where I work out massively complex interdependencies and data workflows Nothing on a computer remotely compares to the speed and specificity of pen or chalk in hand

Almondsetat 2y ago
Except a tablet with pen support
- AndrewKemendo 2y ago
  Not even close. That can break and isn’t perfectly 100% available like my analog method and has much less transportability

courseofaction 2y ago

There are better explanations for the general downturn of productivity despite better tools: Increased focus on extraction since the expansion of neoliberal policies in the 70s. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

rdlecler1 2y ago

This analysis ignores the impact of competition. A car produced today is better (and more complex to make) than a car produced in 1980. Technological productivity isn’t just about improving the number of units or dollar value produced/hours input. Technology can make products more competitive without any increase in productivity by making them better, and, therefore more attractive, to customers even if unit cost or volume stays fixed.

beretguy 2y ago
I don’t know. We need to define “better” first. My friend has 1970s F150 that still drives. “For how long will car run so that i don’t have to buy a new one” - that’s my definition of “better”. Will modern cars run 50 years from now?
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  Modern cars seem to be vastly more reliable than even cars from the 90s. They also generally have nicer features
- dahart 2y ago
  Car longevity has been increasing over time [1], despite anecdotes of a few long-lived vehicles here and there. So, cars are getting better by your metric. They’re also getting better by all other metrics: safety, fuel economy, speed, reliability, conveniences, comfort, style, etc., etc. I’ve driven a still-running 70’s F-150 recently and owned a 2020s F-150 for a year. There is practically no comparison, I would never buy the 70s vehicle given the choice, they are worlds apart. The 70s truck is uncomfortable, slow, and unsafe in today’s traffic. It is also temperamental and requires more maintenance, cold in the cabin in the winter, hard to see when it’s raining or snowing. Probably the only thing I could say honestly about the 70s truck that’s better in any way is that the purchase price was lower. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity#Statistics
- hvs 2y ago
  The vehicles still running from the 1970's suffer from survivorship bias.

smeej 2y ago

I'm noticing a version of this as I pilot switching to a handwritten bullet journal for task management. I'll still sit down at the computer to brainstorm and organize the tasks of my projects, because being able to move list items around is a huge advantage, but when it actually comes to doing the darn things? It's been so much more effective to track them in the notebook. Planning out my daily schedule, figuring out what I can do in which timeframe, and making sure things don't fall through the cracks has worked so much better on paper.

dahart 2y ago

The financial services industry has been revolutionized by computers, I have no idea why the author thought that would make a good example. Today’s stock markets & high frequency trading & online banks & international finance didn’t (and can’t) even exist without computers. The explosion of personal investing and day trading that has changed trading doesn’t exist without computers. The entire computer industry itself has accelerated and grown because of computers, nowhere has he accounted for the “productivity” attributed to sales of computers. Fields I’ve worked in, video games and CG films, have absolutely increased efficiency with computers: for equal sized productions, the quality has gone up and the workforce needed has gone down over time consistently for decades. The article has only one single and completely vague datapoint that includes anything from the last 30 years, that’s a major red flag. The invective portmanteaus and insult words are also a red flag and very weak argumentation. Is that supposed to make up for the complete lack of any relevant data? Not to mention some of the insults are worse than iffy by todays standards and don’t reflect well on the author. Call me rather unconvinced, I guess.

superfunny 2y ago
Agreed - I was very surprised to hear this. From Dividend.com: "In the late 1960s, the volume of trading activity increased dramatically. With the drastic increase in volume, the NYSE had $4 billion in unprocessed transactions by 1968. To catch up, the exchange closed every Wednesday from June 12, 1968 to December 31, 1968. During this crisis, over 100 brokers failed due to the high volume of transaction that could not be processed." Today, the NYSE processes trading volumes of 3-4 billion shares per day.

Nevermark 2y ago

Under appreciated: Automation creates, or dramatically enhances, the need to fully understand problems and solutions at the most detailed and practical levels. Because automation removes the valuable manual ad hoc flexibility to adapt to most wonkiness. 1. When a job requires a mix of human and computer work, productivity changes are very dependent on interface details. Even one slightly confusing GUI, slowness of feedback, a tool that isn't quite as flexible as a job needs, or an inability to see/edit/use related information at the same time, can greatly harm productivity. 2. When a job is completely automated, productivity can go way up. But this productivity doesn't get attributed to human workers, it is corporate productivity. And then only if this highly optimized task really provides value. There is a lot of performative information processing, with conjectured long term payoffs, serving the needs of management and tech workers to look busy, and believe they are valuable. For both human and corporate productivity, automation makes it extremely easy to decrease productivity due to the most subtle mismatches between problems and solutions. When work is done by hand, these mismatches tend to be glaringly obvious, less tolerated, and more easily mitigated or eliminated.

sobellian 2y ago

Am I nuts, or does the first graph show exactly the opposite of his claim? He says it shows declining productivity, but labor productivity rises. Costs also rise but this is exactly what one should expect from labor-saving devices, no?