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> Basically low-productivity industries like health care How are you defining productivity? Lots of people in the medical industry make very good wages. Lots o

> Basically low-productivity industries like health care How are you defining productivity? Lots of people in the medical industry make very good wages. Lots of people in the tech industry do not have great wages. Heath care is ~18% of GDP and growing... United Health has p/e ratio higher than Apple and Facebook... The health care industry is tremendously efficient at sucking money out of your pocket for not great results. At least with Apple, people are generally satisfied with the services rendered.

nostrademons 2y ago
Productivity has a standard economics definition: dollars in / hours worked. The medical industry employs a lot of people. Yes, lots of people have decent wages - that just means the service is expensive, because many hours worked * decent wages = many dollars. Tech has a hit-driven structure. A tech company that finds product/market fit can generate huge profits per employee - Apple and Google were running at over $1M/employee for a while, and Whatsapp serviced a billion users on 13 employees. That lets them pay high wages on low employee counts. The huge profitability for successful tech companies inspires a lot of copycats which don't make much money at all - these are the parts of the tech industry that pay low wages. But the sustainable parts of the industry - the ones that actually generate profits from a useful product - all extremely high productivity, because an engineer can write a piece of software and the software can be duplicated infinitely.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  > Apple and Google were running at over $1M/employee for a while So is United Health.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    No, it has never come close. The profit margins for UNH are at the highest they have ever been (6%). Profit margins for all the other managed care organizations (health insurance companies) are 2%. They are the exact opposite of tech companies. $22B/440k employees = $50k profit per employee. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-group/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...

nostrademons 2y ago

Productivity has a standard economics definition: dollars in / hours worked. The medical industry employs a lot of people. Yes, lots of people have decent wages - that just means the service is expensive, because many hours worked * decent wages = many dollars. Tech has a hit-driven structure. A tech company that finds product/market fit can generate huge profits per employee - Apple and Google were running at over $1M/employee for a while, and Whatsapp serviced a billion users on 13 employees. That lets them pay high wages on low employee counts. The huge profitability for successful tech companies inspires a lot of copycats which don't make much money at all - these are the parts of the tech industry that pay low wages. But the sustainable parts of the industry - the ones that actually generate profits from a useful product - all extremely high productivity, because an engineer can write a piece of software and the software can be duplicated infinitely.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> Apple and Google were running at over $1M/employee for a while So is United Health.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  No, it has never come close. The profit margins for UNH are at the highest they have ever been (6%). Profit margins for all the other managed care organizations (health insurance companies) are 2%. They are the exact opposite of tech companies. $22B/440k employees = $50k profit per employee. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-group/number-of-employees https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...