[HN Gopher] Why isn't new technology making us more productive?
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Why isn't new technology making us more productive?
Author : gumby
Score : 78 points
Date : 2022-05-24 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| partiallypro wrote:
| It is, it also gives us more downtime during the workday that
| isn't reflected in the numbers.
| corrral wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true. There are accounts of incredible
| waste and normalized, office-wide work-dodging-while-
| pretending-to-work in the earliest years of the post-war white-
| collar office. They read like they could have been written
| yesterday, with a few of the details changed.
|
| It could be that as more people moved into white-collar work,
| though, the fraction of the population experiencing and
| participating in that kind of thing has gone up.
| uejfiweun wrote:
| 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.
| mikewarot wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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-
| presid...
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| All the productivity gains are nullified by a drop in risk-
| taking.
| adolph wrote:
| + increased "compliance" measures
| kylecordes wrote:
| 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.
| wvenable wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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.
| wvenable wrote:
| But how is this productivity measured across an entire
| country? How does unemployment factor in? If I'm making the
| workers twice as effective but we then lay off 50% of the
| workforce -- how does that factor in?
|
| I've made many jobs disappear.
| gumby wrote:
| > But how is this productivity measured across an entire
| country?
|
| On a total GDP basis it would be GDP divided by labor
| hours, no more no less. A national economy is complex,
| and especially one like the US or Europe, in which a lot
| of financial services are involved. So typically it is
| done on a sector basis (labor force productivity in
| steelmaking or construction, or mining, or office work).
|
| Sometimes it's quite tricky: when the "output" of a given
| person goes up a lot it could lead to a different product
| (e.g. when the spreadsheet meant one person could do
| financial analysis that had previously required multiple
| people and a lot of time, it didn't mean less time doing
| analysis but instead significantly more sophisticated
| analysis in the same time, with the objective (at least)
| of finding better deals or avoiding worse ones).
|
| > How does unemployment factor in?
|
| It doesn't. It's simply output divided by input. Don't
| mix the two.
|
| The same output with half the people means a doubling in
| productivity for that activity. What happens to the other
| half of people? Orthodox economics says they find some
| other job, perhaps a more productive one or more likely
| less so. Pragmatics says some never work again, some find
| a (often but not always) better job.
|
| That's harsh, but the "lump of labor" fallacy is indeed a
| fallacy.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > "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 wrote:
| > 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > On the contrary, investors and managers will be very
| impressed by that.
|
| No, they won't. You're free to propose any definitions of
| "productivity" you like, but this particular proposal
| doesn't remotely match what anyone will ever be talking
| about in discussions about productivity in the economy.
| gumby wrote:
| Indeed I propose the standard definition of productivity
| used in economics departments, business schools, and
| thousands of textbooks, news articles and the like,
| _including those written by people, like Brynjolfsson,
| quoted in the article._
|
| Seems a lot easier to refer to papers, statistics and the
| like when you use the same terminology everyone else
| does.
| lkrubner wrote:
| """"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 wrote:
| > 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.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 1000x increase in capability coupled with 1000x increase in
| waste
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| > 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.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| They would get another rolodex.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > 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).
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Am I missing something, or is this like the first time you
| see a guy with AirPods? What's the significance?
| kylecordes wrote:
| 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.
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| 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.
| evan_ wrote:
| and when he gets home he can eat bread and watch the circus
| on his phone!
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Sure. Do you think it would be better to be poor without
| bread and circuses? Our bread and circuses are getting
| better and that seems good.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Consider bullshit jobs. Yes, there's "work" being done, so it's
| "productive," but is it really?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| 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-
| niels...
| iskander wrote:
| 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.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| 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-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 wrote:
| > it's not true. it's debunked now
|
| Where has it been debunked?
| uejfiweun wrote:
| It's not that I advocate for wealth redistribution, quite the
| opposite in fact. But I certainly wish that these leaders
| would just, y'know, RAISE WAGES. Rent is skyrocketing,
| housing is skyrocketing, medical expenses are skyrocketing,
| car prices are skyrocketing, and after 40 years of this, it's
| finally _just now_ that wages are starting to catch up a tiny
| bit. Meanwhile, CEO pay has risen >30% since the pandemic
| alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2022/05/23/ceo-
| worker...
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| Right, rising wages is what most people demand of
| politicians.
|
| But, there's two ways to get more of what you want:
|
| 1) rising wages
|
| 2) lowering costs.
|
| #1 -> it would be nice but you can only squeeze so much
| blood from a turnip.
|
| #2 has gotten far too little attention and has a lot of
| potential to do good, if we start pursuing it in a way that
| increases overall prosperity, not decreasing propsperity
| xmprt wrote:
| I don't know if raising wages alone will help. Increased
| wages will just make cost of production more expensive and
| raise prices or allow landlords to charge more for rent.
| What's more important is solving housing, transportation,
| and healthcare issues so people can satisfy those needs
| cheaply. Build more houses, improve urban planning and
| public transit, and create national healthcare.
| dahart wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| "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.
| dahart wrote:
| Let's frame it differently. If you redistributed all
| wealth from just the top 1% today to all us citizens,
| each person would get 40T / 300M = $133K, which would
| make a real (and massive) difference in most people's
| lives. Redistribute the top 10%, and everyone gets $320k
| in savings. This would be an average of 30x more savings
| for the bottom half than they'd have otherwise.
|
| The biggest problem with your calculation is the
| arbitrary line of billionaires, which leaves out all the
| millionaires. The top 1% have wealth exceeding 40T, while
| the bottom 50% have sum total wealth less than the 4T you
| used for billionaires.
|
| Another problem is dividing by 30, that's not well
| justified. Half of all us wealth was gained in the last
| 10 years. Your calculation implicitly assumes you would
| redistribute slowly, but since you're using a
| hypothetical, why would you do that? Why not redistribute
| all of it today and see if the sum is meaningful? It
| doesn't make sense to redistribute slowly, regardless of
| how long it took to accumulate.
|
| A third problem is leaving out income from the summary,
| since wealth is savings and the lower class has little.
| You conclude that $500/year sounds small but glossed over
| the fact that it represent savings not income, and that
| it would add up to a lot even in your setup.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| Ok, if you disagree with the number 30 as the number of
| years needed to acquire that wealth, just use yearly
| income figures.
|
| Assuming 60K is the average. So, top 10% at 173K means
| 113K more than the median houshold. 113/10 = 11.3K extra.
| So, redistributing top 10% would mean 11.3K extra for 60K
| average. It's something but not life changing.
| Considering that more than 70% of million dollar lotto
| winner loses almost everything within a few years, I'd
| say an additional 11K wouldn't help people a huge amount.
|
| And, you have to remember, this is an excerise for
| learning how much wealth is distributed per capita in the
| top. if you actually instituted anything close to these
| policies, total, average wages would decrease
| dramatically as the reduced incentive to earn more
| prevents people from earning more.
| dahart wrote:
| > So, top 10% at 173K
|
| That's the threshold income of the top 10%, not the
| average. The average is _much_ higher.
|
| You're insisting the spread out wealth is small in the
| face of evidence that it's large, larger than your
| summary even by your own analysis.
|
| > Considering that more than 70% of million dollar lotto
| winner loses almost everything within a few years
|
| This is yet another faulty analysis, and the 70% number
| and "million dollar" part are viral misquotes, they are
| wrong. https://www.nefe.org/news/2018/01/research-
| statistic-on-fina...
|
| I don't blame you for it, this misleading headline has
| been widely reported over and over again. (But please
| consider not repeating this false information anymore.)
|
| The primary study that lead to this conclusion is a study
| of Florida lottery winners of amounts less than $150K.
| The actual result of the study showed bankruptcy rates
| falling initially, and then rising again after several
| years, as people ran out of their winnings. The rates
| returning to normal was reported as people losing
| everything, which is clearly misleading spin.
|
| https://eml.berkeley.edu/~cle/laborlunch/hoekstra.pdf
| hnthrowawy wrote:
| your "simple equation" is completely inadequate. When a
| company improves their efficiency they don't just cut a check
| "to the billionaires"
|
| If it is causing share price increases, every shareholder
| benefits. Why are you excluding millionaires?
|
| > 5,671,005 US households have a net worth of $3 million or
| more
|
| There's another 16T right there, minimum.
|
| The companies in S&P 500 hold another 1.5T in cash
|
| Presumably there are workers at these companies being
| rewarded handsomely for these productivity gains, how do you
| account for that wealth?
|
| The housing market in California grew 1.4T last year, now
| sitting at over 9T total "value".
|
| This is just first thoughts for my envelope math. Looking at
| "billionaires" is overly simplistic
| jayd16 wrote:
| I would argue it's still a worthy goal if only to
| redistribute the influence that wealth brings.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >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.
|
| I find this hypothesis very intriguing. I too have found it
| troubling that the narrative against billionaires doesn't
| quite seem to line up with the envelope math. That said, I
| wonder about the optimal parameters of the inevitable pareto
| distribution of wealth. I think the effect on money velocity
| and total wealth generation among other things is worth
| considering. In history, it does _seem_ generally like
| conditions have been good when inequality is relatively low.
| (At least within a window of time next to that time.)
|
| However, I'm really hoping you could elaborate more on what
| you're calling an apparent loss of wealth since I'm very much
| curious.
|
| What information is that conclusion based on?
|
| Without delving into a description that is TOO laborious,
| could you give a 100,000ft summary or list of things you
| think that have contributed to that or where you think the
| wealth has gone?
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| as a starting point for figuring out the drop in wealth, I
| think we should calculate things in terms of number of man
| hours worked to achieve a given objective: shelter, food,
| water. Using dollars and CPI numbers is fraught with
| problems due to problems in their methodologies, which are
| quite numerous.
|
| The most important aspects of wealth are the basic needs of
| human beings: shelter, food, water and by extension
| transportation (because it's required to earn "money"),
| healthcare (because if you have an accident they can come
| after your shelter), and education (because it's a
| requirement for earning money").
|
| Now we have a framework for identifying drops in wealth.
|
| I think the biggest drops in wealth have occurred in
| shelter, medical and a little bit in transportation. if you
| dive into those with the methodology of number of man hours
| worked to achieve them, you'll see what i'm talking about.
| Sometimes it's not obvious. Cost per mile in transportation
| can decrease (progress) and you can still get a decrease in
| wealth, if for instance the average commute distance
| increases faster than the drop in cost per mile. Just an
| example, of where increasing capabilities over time, don't
| necessarily translate to greater wealth. Generally speaking
| don't just calculate the increase in capability/man hour
| but also the amount of capability required to achieve the
| objective.
|
| Growing Govt: over the last 100 years we've seen countries
| grow govt spend as percent of GDP from low single digits to
| 40 to 50%. You may be in favor of all this spending but I
| strongly suspect that the total amount you get back from
| govt, is less than what went in. example: "this is
| especially apparent when someone needs to pay 5K for a
| lawyer, just to apply for medicaid." alot of wealth can be
| lost in this way. solution: society needs much more
| efficient means of wealth transfer mechanisms.
|
| Hypothesis: exponential Growing human population on a
| finite planet with finite resources (finite amount of
| developal land), ore, oil, commodities, will lead to or has
| led to decreases in wealth which show up as paying more and
| more for things.
| debdut wrote:
| wow! maybe you should write it up in a blog. awesome
| otikik wrote:
| I partially agree with this:
|
| > I think the biggest drops in wealth have occurred in
| shelter, medical and a little bit in transportation.
|
| But my conclusion is very different: shelter, healthcare
| and transport have not _evaporated_. If anything, we are
| more capable of treating people than before. We have the
| internet now, we should be able to educate more people.
|
| The problem is that the cost of those things has
| increased significantly in the last 80 years, but
| salaries have stagnated. A diabetic teacher could buy a
| house and afford insulin on a single salary, now they
| barely can afford the later while they live with their
| parents, because they can't even rent.
|
| As to why things are more expensive now... well I think
| the answer is that the difference is going to a small
| group of extremely rich individuals. Insurance and
| hospital owners in the case of healthcare, University
| owners on education. And lawyers in all layers.
|
| The cost of transportation is a bit more complex. It is a
| finite world, yes. But we'll run of nice weather to plant
| crops before we run out of oil.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Both can be true:
|
| a.) A tiny number of billionaires have reorganized society in
| ways that cause benefits to accrue to themselves.
|
| b.) The net size of those benefits, distributed equally over
| all people, is tiny.
|
| All this means is that people are being used in absurdly
| inefficient ways, because that benefits whoever is in charge.
|
| For example, plantations are arguably like this. They are
| less productive, per acre, than smallholdings. But they
| _scale_ : A single owner can make the plantation arbitrarily
| large. "Who cares if the country grows half as much per acre
| as it could, if I get to control 10x the acres? That's still
| 5x the wealth for me!"
|
| Surely we in software, home of the Mythical Man Month, know
| all about this? It doesn't matter if the microserfs are less
| productive, if you can have all of them to yourself.
| titzer wrote:
| It'd be a lot more effective to redistribute that wealth,
| first, not over 30 years, and second, not to 100% of the
| population, but to the bottom income brackets, so the
| smallest quintile or even decile. So a one-time payout to the
| bottom 10% would be $150,000. For 20% or 30% of the
| population, that kind of money could _absolutely_ and
| _instantly_ lift them out of poverty.
|
| Moreover, you needn't take every last cent from these
| billionaires. Just leave them with a _mere_ $100 million each
| and they still have more money than they could reasonably
| spend in a lifetime.
| wincy wrote:
| Seems immoral to give it to the bottom 10% of people in the
| US, who are relatively wealthy compared to the rest of the
| world. Why not give $15,000 each to the 300 million poorest
| people in the world, or $5000 to the 1 billion poorest?
| honkler wrote:
| there are oligarchs in every country, just like the
| united states. Could drain the swamp and give people back
| their money.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >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.
|
| Don't leave us hanging throw8383833jj, where did the wealth
| go?
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| The biggest drop in wealth is Shelter and Medical. 50 years
| ago land was much cheaper. A 300K house (non-land cost)
| costs 310K (maybe 10k for the land). Whereas today, in
| states where much job creation happens (i won't name
| names), a 300K house costs 600K or more. You could say, the
| previous land owner made all that money and it's true. But,
| it's just a one time wealth transfer from the latest
| generation to previous generations of land owners. The
| problem is, going forward from here, there are no more
| winners in this game. By, charging vast amounts of money
| for land that should cost very little, we're simply
| depriving human being of wealth. Even CA, has more acres
| than people and yet, even in the country side where there
| is miles of empty land in every direction, we see houses
| huddled together, a mere few feet apart like some kind of
| nazi concentration camp. going forward, this is a game with
| no winners. the wealth is simply denied. conversely, by
| denying ourselves this wealth, we can create the wealth out
| of thin air by allowing the land to be developed OR simply
| by moving jobs (where jobs go, people follow) to areas
| where there is sufficient developable land (politically
| achievable).
|
| Also, there's a huge laundry list of regulation, and zoning
| that impact numerous industries like housing and
| transportation that make these things more expensive than
| they need to be and pass those costs onto consumers.
|
| Just for comparison, i once, calculated that in my area, it
| takes roughly 80,000 man hours to afford the cheapest house
| in my suburban neighborhood in the bay area. And yet, in
| thailand (Jon Jai a humble farmer with no education and no
| construction training and youtuber), has demonstrated that
| he could build a modest home with just 200 man hours! He'll
| tell you, that despite the fact that he lives in country
| where economists say his per capita income is more than 20
| tiems lower than US, he's easily able to afford a house, 1
| acre of land and enough food for his family of six and only
| works 15 min a day (2 months full time out of the year).
| too much to explain here, but you can visit his channel on
| youtube for details. I was blown away. and of course, he
| has the freedom to do so, because less regulations and
| zoning to get in the way. Sure, he doesn't have many
| gadgets or cars and even a rice cooker would be hard to
| acquire but he has the essentials of life: shelter, food
| and water in abundance: and that's what freedom is largely
| about.
| kylecordes wrote:
| The challenge with shelter is that it is fundamentally a
| positional good. Everyone wants to be within the x% most
| convenient, which is say, desirable, places to live. So
| as there are more and more people with more money to
| chase those limited "slots", they get more expensive.
| Making everyone worse off.
|
| The solution is to massively build many more new good
| places to live; but there are also enormous forces
| against that.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| Absolutely >>> The solution is to massively build many
| more new good places to live
|
| People underestimate the positive impact of this
| solution.
|
| It's not like we don't have the space. All that's lacking
| is the will.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Space is not just space. Space has qualities such as non
| humid climates, near mountains, beaches, access to
| potable water, and of course, political considerations.
|
| Also, people like more space than less space so
| incumbents will fight against others coming in, unless
| the others are bringing benefits such as money or labor
| for the incumbents.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Agree! That's super interesting. I've longed for a life
| that is much less coupled to work. Thinking about the US,
| it is somewhat ironic that many US residents think of
| themselves as self-reliant yet end up inadvertently
| supporting systems that undermine true autonomy.
| mbrameld wrote:
| If all you want is a shack on some land you own, you
| could do that for much less than 80,000 man hours. Land
| in NE Arizona sells for a few hundred dollars an acre.
| There's no zoning and very little in the way of
| regulation.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| I'm reality it would be even less than that since the wealth
| of most billionaires is in the form of speculative wealth
| such as company stock. If tomorrow everyones wealth was
| liquidated through a magical oracle that could know the true
| economic value of any given asset you'd find there would be a
| lot less billionaires in the world
| humbleMouse wrote:
| confidantlake wrote:
| Stole is pretty loaded language. Also where are you pulling
| the number 30 from? Seems arbitrary to me. 500 per year for
| every man women and child for 30 years is a lot of money.
| That would be equivalent to a one time payment of $60,000
| dollars to every family of 4. Sounds like a lot of money to
| me.
| debdut wrote:
| If 60K is lot, how about giving each person 15K and
| stopping all taxes and redistribution from there on?
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| 30 is my estimation as to the number of years it takes for
| the average billionaire to achieve their wealth. most
| billionaires are pretty old, so I'd say 30 is conservative.
|
| so, 2K per family/year in a country where the median
| houshold income is 60K, that's about 3.3% of their income.
| dahart wrote:
| It's irrelevant how long it took to accumulate. If you're
| hypothetically redistributing wealth, then the
| hypothetical side assumption should be that it took the
| same amount of time to accumulate the "redistributed"
| wealth. You should be comparing saved wealth in the real
| world to saved wealth in the hypothetical world, not
| using a strange misleading wealth per year metric.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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
| DeWilde wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-
| low...
|
| https://time.com/longform/clean-water-access-united-states/
| sharemywin wrote:
| 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.
| bennysomething wrote:
| Lost me at the bit about fud from rich people. I really doubt
| there is a conspiracy.
| thewarrior wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Services are also productivity.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Yes but only to an extent. We cannot have an economy only
| of rappers and influencers.
| jimmydeans wrote:
| [deleted]
| mikkergp wrote:
| I mean, technology making us more productive seems obviously true
| on it's face, so what gives?
|
| --> Productivity, which is defined as the value of goods and
| services produced per hour of work.
|
| Seems like an interesting measure. So as companies become more
| efficient and the cost of goods goes down, so does productivity.
| So you might be able to argue we were more probably productive
| per unit of work building mainframes than we are building
| iphones.
| spullara wrote:
| I think that productivity per actual second worked has
| drastically increased and people just don't work as much as they
| used to, at least in office jobs.
| 127 wrote:
| Because nobody wants to make themselves or their friends
| obsolete. In fact, technical debt is a feature, not a bug. Invent
| a highly functional, durable tool: nobody will buy anything
| related to it from you again.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Generally, this seems to be rather asyncronous in large
| companies / "enterprises". I've seen entire departments that
| are not doing anything relevant. In less severe cases, there
| are still mostly a few people that do a lot of work, and many
| that are doing very little. Sort of like the pareto principle
| of productivity.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| We are more productive. We are doing more with less people. It
| doesn't seem like we are more productive because most people are
| overworked which creates an illusion of unproductivity. Most of
| those jobs that were lost in 2008-2009 were never replaced,
| everyone left just had to pick up the slack which tech helped
| facilitate
|
| The other aspect is that a lot of our tech is vapid
| entertainment. As buzz aldrin said, "They promised me mars
| colonies. All we got was Facebook" or something along those
| lines.
| ipnon wrote:
| The right side of the bell curve can now program an application
| worth many dollars per month and zero marginal reproduction
| costs. The left side of the bell curve is incapable of extending
| these technologies but increasingly consumes them due to their
| low cost. This can explain the seemingly paradoxical phenomena of
| the rich becoming fabulously richer, wage growth stagnating on
| average, and productivity barely improving. The inventions of the
| last 50 years were of smart people for smart people. We wanted
| flying cars on Mars, we ended up exchanging Amazon warehouse jobs
| for free TikTok.
| npc12345 wrote:
| There's also people with no high school diplomas making 6
| figures from advertising on those very same social networks.
| vkou wrote:
| A good hustler can make six figures in a sales job without
| any diploma.
|
| Sales doesn't care about your credentials, all your boss
| wants to know is if you can close deals.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Productivity is poorly defined and basically impossible to
| measure. So when discussing it forget any facts and just accept
| that you will have to talk about it like you do art...
| morninglight wrote:
| If you regularly visited China over the last 30 years, you
| would have a clear and dramatic understanding of productivity.
|
| .
| LatteLazy wrote:
| No, I'd be even more confused:
|
| I'd look at huge building projects and millions of resulting
| apartments that were built but now had no buyers and were sat
| empty on some zombie bank's balance sheet. And I would not
| know whether they were worth sticker price (and China was
| very productive) or nothing (and China was very unproductive)
| or anywhere in between.
|
| I'd look at FoxConn with >350000 workers making some of the
| worlds most popular and profitable consumer electronics, but
| then I'd see they only make 3.6% profit in a country with
| >3.7% risk free rate of return and think: they're wasting
| their time and would be better being liquidated.
|
| It's almost as if big chunks of China are run to keep people
| busy and employed and meet arbitrary central targets and not
| to make things people want at a price they will pay...
|
| Actually understanding what productive means, and how to
| measure it is really really hard. And at every step companies
| and governments have all sorts of perverse incentives to
| disguise it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I'd look at huge building projects and millions of
| resulting apartments that were built but now had no buyers
| and were sat empty on some zombie bank's balance sheet. And
| I would not know whether they were worth sticker price (and
| China was very productive) or nothing (and China was very
| unproductive) or anywhere in between.
|
| That's just being confused by propaganda. If you look back
| at all of the Chinese ghost city stories and note the
| names, virtually all of those cities are full and
| productive now. I always thought the stories were a line to
| make excuses for US lack of investment in infrastructure.
| sharemywin wrote:
| I would think globalization and the shift from manufacturing to
| services is like a slow tax on productivity. so for every
| increase in productivity at some office there's a huge negative
| productivity impact when a factory moves overseas.
| kansface wrote:
| 1. Technology is making us more productive! Way, way more
| productive. More or less all of the gains are captured by tech
| companies who make the technology.
|
| 2. Technology is not necessarily adopted for productivity. It is
| often adopted to facilitate legibility into the day to day
| activity of the organization. This is often at the expense of
| productivity! Moreover, this is often acceptable to management!
| parentheses wrote:
| Capability != Productivity
|
| Increasing capability means we can do more with less. So we
| choose to use less resources.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Then why is my attendence still required for 8 hours a day, in
| a field where working 4-6 hours would not significantly
| decrease my overall productivity, but increase my well-being
| and capability to build something on my own.
|
| The limiting factor for productivity in the knowledge economy
| (or any work requiring creativity) hasn't been time for a
| while, why do we insist on keeping it where it has been since
| the tail end of the industrial revolution (or slightly earlier
| / later, depending on where you are).
| smilebot wrote:
| Why Isn't _every_ new tech making us productive. Some definitely
| are, diff tracking like github, any comms software, accounting
| software etc do make us a lot more productive.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/gbNj2
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220524170241/https://www.nytime...
| meow_mix wrote:
| When I think about the productivity adds from tech from the last
| 20 years, I'm often left wondering why we aren't working _less_ .
|
| Others have mentioned us navigating faster, having neat new
| gadgets, etc, but fundamentally what I and many others want is
| more _free time_
| andrekandre wrote:
| > I'm often left wondering why we aren't working less
|
| isn't that in direct conflict with expectations of compounded
| annual growth?
|
| what does our economic (and political) models say about that?
|
| because less work == less growth to many people...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Because new technology is as Thiel often quips limited to the
| world of bits rather than the world of atoms. Paul Krugman once
| asked, if you go into an average house right now and you take out
| all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s?
|
| Gordon in the _Rise and Fall of American Growth_ gives a similar
| example, what if you went into a time capsule between say 1890
| and 1950 compared to 1960 and 2010? In one case you 're going to
| see skyscrapers, commercial airplanes, nuclear power plants,
| electricity everywhere, cars going at amazing speeds. In the
| latter case what's the difference, people paying with their
| phones and different fashion mostly.
|
| 'Innovation' in the internet age, say the last 30 years has
| mostly been limited to enable hedonistic digital consumption with
| very little impact on how we fundamentally move through the
| world. The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years
| ago is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet. A 100 years
| ago to 50 years ago meant going from horse carriages to trains
| and from weeks on a ship to hours on a plane. Today the average
| person crosses the Atlantic no faster than we did decades ago.
|
| That's why productivity growth is low, the world hasn't changed
| that much. There's still marginal improvements obviously which do
| add up over time but the 'unprecedent pace of innovation' you
| hear about from tech evangelists is nowhere.
|
| Another interesting thought experiment is, how many digital
| services, modern tech and so on would you be willing to trade for
| something mundane, say your dishwasher, a hot shower, the toilet,
| a car, soap, if you could only have one or the other? I think it
| really puts into perspective how much or rather little value
| those 'innovations' add.
| Quinner wrote:
| 30 years ago in order to navigate somewhere you had to ask
| someone for directions and write down notes. If you missed a
| turn, god help you. We fundamentally move through the world
| vastly differently thanks to digital maps. Many people (and in
| a few years, the majority) are doing so in cars that use
| electric motors instead of internal combustion engines.
|
| One way to tell whether you're in an 80s house would be to look
| around for reference books, encyclopedias, rolodexes, filing
| cabinets. If you wanted to know more about something, you
| probably had to go to a library, which might not even have a
| book on the topic (maybe if you were particularly determined to
| know the answer you'd wait a few weeks for an ILL).
|
| Its a bit sad to me that you look at this enormous sea change
| in how we interact with the world and see Angry Birds.
| [deleted]
| tunesmith wrote:
| I think your last sentence is unnecessary. What purpose does
| it serve?
| burnished wrote:
| It relates the audience and the author on an emotional
| level.
| dockd wrote:
| How about money?
|
| In 1960, you either had to have cash or find a place that took
| a check to make purchases. Maybe some places took a credit
| card. Ever have to wait in line behind someone that is writing
| a check? "Productive" won't come to mind.
|
| To get that cash you had to walk into a bank during banking
| hours. Then we got ATMs and could get our money any time of
| day. No more cutting out of work to deposit that royalty check.
|
| More places started taking cards as well as cash. I distinctly
| remember asking businesses if they took cards _before_ making a
| purchase. We still had holdouts like restaurants that didn't
| split the check.
|
| Now look at 2010. Pay with cash/check/card. Wait a few more
| years and you can do this with your phone. Get your meal tab
| split however you like. Owe someone money? No more writing
| checks, going to the ATM, just hit up Venmo.
|
| Now, what's the productivity measure in that? I have no idea.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Honestly the change is pretty small.
|
| Up until at least the mid 90s everywhere took checks.
| Honestly today interacting with the cash register at CVS
| takes longer than writing a check.
|
| Sure, a 30 second check writing reduced to a 10 second tap to
| pay can be a little bit of an improvement (except when it
| doesn't work), but really it's not that much better.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Now, what's the productivity measure in that? I have no
| idea.
|
| Bordering on nothing, I think, other than that we have the
| opportunity to make street robbery much less lucrative if we
| stopped artificially inflating the price of phones, because
| people don't have to carry cash any more (if they're content
| with each purchase being recorded and data mined by 20
| different companies and their government's intelligence
| agencies.)
|
| Burglary rates have dropped precipitously with cheap big
| screen tvs and cheap audio players. My dad built his entire
| young life around putting together his very expensive stereo
| system, I have a single dirty old bluetooth speaker that
| sounds nearly as good. Being not worth stealing makes it even
| better.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > if you go into an average house right now and you take out
| all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s?
|
| Yes. Even the cheapest house built to code will be noticeably
| better than one from 1980s. The quality of materials,
| technology of materials, wiring, plumbing, flooring,
| insulation, etc will all be better.
|
| > The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago
| is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet
|
| Not true, for similar reasons as above. Name a 2022 Corolla
| equivalent that could be purchased in the 1980s, safety, fuel
| efficiency, and reliability wise, at a similar inflation
| adjusted price. No 1980s car will even come close, and that is
| just for the most basic car today.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I have lived in "luxury" apartments lately and they're all
| filled with the cheapest possible materials. More "advanced"
| in that as much as possible things are build of engineered
| materials which end up being a sort of wood and glue foam
| which are definitely not meant to last.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| "Luxury" is simply a marketing term and has no importance.
|
| The relevant question is how do the cheapest materials
| today compares to the cheapest materials in the 1980s?
| colechristensen wrote:
| I dunno, spending $4000/mo in Mountain View, you tend to
| have a few expectations. (in other words, it is more or
| less impossible to rent anything of actual quality)
|
| The garbage materials of today didn't exist nearly as
| much in the 80s so they'd have to have used at least
| cheap solid wood instead of sawdust foam.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is related to supply and demand of land/housing
| units. I do not see what it has to do with progress or
| lack thereof in building materials.
| diordiderot wrote:
| I read something along the lines of 'a stock 2020 Camero is
| faster than a 2000 Ferrari' with fewer cylinders
| analog31 wrote:
| My house was built in the early 60s, has hardwood flooring
| throughout, copper plumbing, the wiring is all in hard
| conduit, the 2x4's are actually a bit thicker than today's,
| and of a higher grade. The original windows are still
| functioning, though not as efficient as modern ones. The
| appliances are modern because they've all been replaced.
|
| Today's house in the same region uses lower grade lumber,
| carpeted floors, Romex, and plastic plumbing.
|
| Agreed about the Corolla. I owned a second hand 80s Corolla,
| and it was the best car I had ever experienced up to that
| point, but a second hand Corolla would be so much better
| today.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You can still get those things from your 60s house, it will
| simply cost more (adjusted for inflation).
|
| But I do not see how quality of life are any worse with LVT
| flooring instead of wood, or PEX plumbing instead of
| copper, or wiring in a hard conduit instead of not wiring
| in a hard conduit. I would even say quality of life is
| better. Why would I want to wax wood, and have a more
| difficult to repair floor. An LVT piece gets damaged, I
| just pop it out and put a new one in.
|
| Effectively, advances in materials technology has made a
| home cheaper, and better in my opinion. I would buy a
| random 2022 house over a random 1960s house anyday.
| rablackburn wrote:
| The hardwood floors sound nice, but as far as I'm aware
| plastic plumbing is much more preferable over copper.
|
| Need to fix a leak in a copper pipe? Get ready to weld and
| bend pipes. Need to fix a plastic pipe? Unscrew that
| section, and screw in a new one. No drama.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Quality seems to go through ups and downs, probably in line
| with economic cycles and periods of scarcity. Here, houses
| built in the 20s and earlier were made with high quality
| lumber that is scarcely available these days. I notice that
| rebuilders and renovations of these old houses are careful
| to maintain the base wood layers even when they completely
| strip the facing and almost everything else.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I agree, instead of critiqueing and truly reflecting on what
| went wrong, and what to do to fix it; technologists are
| obsessed with over-praising of how things have gotten better.
| It misses the point that "We could have done _a lot_ better "
| if we weren't so stagnant.
|
| America was a powerhouse of innovation in 1950-1970 both in
| private and public sectors. The progress was impossibly
| exponential.
|
| First step is admission of failure.
| [deleted]
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Personal computers have become a distraction, like TV sets.
| People watching TV are generally not very productive.1 Before
| the internet we referred to TV as "the opiate of the masses".2
| Not only do we now have a worse figurative opiate than TV in
| the form of today's www,3 we have the legalisation of literal
| opiates for the masses thanks to Purdue Pharma.
|
| 1 A plaintiff's lawyer specialising in class action securities
| fraud litigation might be one exception. He might be watching
| CNBC and drafting a new complaint at the same time. :)
|
| 2
| https://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,809673...
|
| 3 Circa 1996
| https://github.com/mikemurr/nc110/blob/master/scripts/web
|
| "The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a
| thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now
| these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP
| handshake" want to run _commerce_ over the damn thing. Ye godz.
| Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of
| worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as
| today 's cable industry!"
|
| I am still using original netcat every day to deal with the
| dismal kludges band-aided together, now run by pinheads.
| Although I use scripts I write myself instead of those of the
| author, netcat's simplicity, portability and reliability over
| 26 years is one of the few things I still enjoy about the www.
| In the rare chance he still uses the www and reads HN, thank
| you Mr Walker for one of the best programs ever written, not to
| mention the entertaining source code comments.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There's a weird disconnect with computers.
|
| The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was 20
| years ago, leading to performance that really have not improved
| a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many applications
| are slower to start today than they were 10 years ago, because
| back then they were binaries and today they are Electron apps.
| Your average web based word processor with cloud storage
| performs about the same as Microsoft Word did on Windows 3.1 on
| a 486 saving onto a floppy. Screens are bigger, resolutions are
| bigger, but the content is largely the same because the limit
| is human perception not technology.
|
| If you actually keep things simple, you can build absolutely
| ridiculous things off modern hardware. I'm running an Internet
| search engine out of my living room. You could not that 20
| years ago. What makes it possible is modern SSDs and the
| absolutely mind-boggling computing power of modern CPU.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Word Processing is maybe not the best example. Human needs in
| terms of writing documents have not changed significantly in
| the last 20-30 years. The mechanics are not the bottleneck.
| neither is application startup time. I know that it is
| something you can measure but I don't agree that it is a
| significant data point. I generally only start a word
| processor once per day and then it stays running as I move
| between writing tasks and other tasks. Startup is an
| insignificant part of that time.
|
| Other tasks have become more efficient in that time period.
| Anything involving graphics has gotten much easier to do on
| computers than before and can be done by more people. Project
| Management tools are much faster and easier to use.
|
| What I do see in a corporate world is an emphasis efficiency
| that requires spending a lot more time tasks and running
| alternate scenarios to be more efficient. This seems more
| doable now because some of these things are easier but its
| too easy to ignore the time spent doing more of this kind of
| thing.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > The software we use is 1000 times more complex than it was
| 20 years ago, leading to performance that really have not
| improved a lot, and a lot of functional stagnation. Many
| applications are slower to start today than they were 10
| years ago, because back then they were binaries and today
| they are Electron apps.
|
| Also known as Wirth's law:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
|
| Sometimes it worries me. If we had a boring set of usable and
| safe tools to use for development, that would also be pretty
| fast, i wouldn't have to update my hardware every 5 years or
| so. But JetBrains IDE's (just one example) basically demand
| that I do, if I want their other shiny features.
|
| Perhaps something like Java instead of Python. Perhaps
| something like Go instead of Java. Perhaps something like
| Rust instead of Go.
|
| Just boring (predictable), stable and dependable programming
| languages, supported on every platform with a set of native
| libraries. Perhaps a bit like what LCL did in regards to GUI
| in particular:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > Paul Krugman once asked, if you go into an average house
| right now and you take out all the screens, could you tell that
| you're not in the 80s?
|
| It's clear to me krugman never held a hammer in his life bc
| that is just laughable statement
| pessimizer wrote:
| Are there a lot more hammers now than in the 80s?
| IshKebab wrote:
| > could you tell that you're not in the 80s?
|
| Well yes, because we have solar panels and heat pumps and
| battery powered power tools and vacuum cleaners and dishwashers
| and microwave ovens and smart lights and ...
|
| You wouldn't expect walls and carpets to change.
| musicale wrote:
| Not to mention:
|
| Ugly (but very bright and power efficient, and cooler) LED
| lighting. Bright blue power LEDs on everything. Less
| fluorescent, minimal incandescent lighting.
|
| Everyone is working at home.
|
| Few books, no newspapers or print magazines, no typewriters,
| maybe even no wired telephone.
|
| The post office only delivers packages and "junk mail."
|
| No "long distance" phone charges.
|
| New/improved appliances: air fryers, instant pot/automated
| pressure/multifunction cookers, high-efficiency washing
| machines, etc.. Fewer toaster ovens and gas ranges or ovens.
|
| Mandatory smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms.
|
| Lower power usage for most appliances.
|
| No bottle returns. Much more "recycling" and industrial
| compost.
|
| No large stereo systems, AM/FM radio, cassette players, or
| boom boxes. Fewer (and poorer quality) record players.
|
| Home delivery of everything via amazon, grocery delivery,
| restaurant food delivery, etc.. UPS, FedEx and Amazon deliver
| many more packages than the USPS.
|
| Fewer people actually own their houses.
|
| Student loan debt. More monthly bills in general.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| > vacuum cleaners
|
| mainstream since at least the 1950s
|
| > dishwashers
|
| 1970s
|
| > microwave ovens
|
| available but fairly expensive in the 80s, ubiquitous in the
| 90s
| Retric wrote:
| The point was vacuums etc have gotten a lot better over
| time.
|
| Electric motors are noticeably lighter, more powerful, and
| more energy efficient today. Yes vacuums in the 1980's
| worked but they where significantly heavier, louder, and
| far more power hungry not to mention more expensive. It
| might not seem like much but I remember the exhaust from
| the family vacuum being noticeably warm. It's even more
| noticeable with cordless vacuums which got not just better
| motors but vastly better batteries as well.
|
| Often it's the parts you don't notice that make a world of
| difference. The finger saver shutoff on a modern saw might
| not seem like much, but those things really make a
| difference in peoples lives.
| musicale wrote:
| > finger saver shutoff
|
| Probably a feature I wouldn't want to give up.
| musicale wrote:
| The Dyson bagless/root cyclonic vacuum design completely
| took over.
|
| "Hoovering" really became dysoning.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Hmm, in the US anyway they started to get inexpensive by
| 1980 or so, same as VCRs.
| simplify wrote:
| Flooring has changed too. Carpets are better looking and more
| resilient. Click vinyl is stronger, has good texture, easier
| to install, and is super durable.
| [deleted]
| DanBC wrote:
| > You wouldn't expect walls and carpets to change
|
| Yes, but even there we're not using flammable polystyrene
| ceiling tiles, nor asbestos floor tiles and asbestos glue any
| more.
| musicale wrote:
| Window insulation and heating/cooling efficiency are often
| greatly improved as well.
|
| Also air conditioning is ubiquitous.
| version_five wrote:
| It's funny to see all the replies missing the point. I agree
| there have been few "step changes" in the way we do things. The
| biggest real one I can think of is the capabilities of small
| motors, that enable things like drones and battery power tools.
| But not a step change, just an incremental improvement.
|
| People had high hopes for mRNA, (no doubt people will take this
| the wrong way) but so far it seems to have been way overhyped.
| That kind of thing - the ability to arbitrarily protect against
| viruses - would potentially qualify.
|
| Overall I think the world is in decline progress wise, even as
| we make incremental gains in previously discovered tech, we
| lose e.g. Concorde or moon landings or even open borders. And
| soon the availability of internal combustion engines to the
| masses if elites have their way.
|
| Other than the neotlithic and industrial revolution, humanity
| has mostly languished. We could easily be in for more of that.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > if you go into an average house right now and you take out
| all the screens, could you tell that you're not in the 80s?
|
| > The difference between a car right now and a car 30 years ago
| is that you can now play angry birds on a tablet.
|
| Energy efficiency and fuel economy have made massive gains.
| Materials are stronger and lighter. Batteries last ages
| compared to 30 years ago.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Also they go wrong a hell of a lot less often. 80s cars were
| mostly complete shit and no one was sorry to see them go.
|
| Also if you crash one, you're vastly less likely to die.
| dragontamer wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck
|
| I always liked this IIHS crash test: 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air
| vs. 2009 Chevrolet Malibu
|
| It really shows the progress. Seatbelts, the "rigid cage"
| to protect the driver, air bags, etc. etc.
|
| The 1959 Bel Air crash-dummy is clearly dead, bouncing
| around the cabin during the crash.
|
| The 2009 Malibu crash-dummy has a sprained neck and the
| face hurts from hitting the air-bag, but clearly survives.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| I see 50s-80s cars on TV and all I can visualise is that
| thin metal hoop steering wheel bisecting my face like a
| melon.
| acjacobson wrote:
| I mostly agree, though I think there are differences you'd
| notice rather quickly (but nothing as big as moving from 1890
| to 1950)
|
| If you removed all the screens you'd probably first notice
| what's missing as opposed to what's different. In many of
| today's homes you wouldn't see things like tape / record
| players, stereos, VCRs, telephones, books, maps, yellow pages,
| rolodexes, calendars - all of these having a digital
| replacement.
|
| And depending on the affluence of the home you'd notice a lot
| more variety of specialty things - for example kitchen
| equipment (espresso machines, burr coffee grinders, instant
| pots, sous vide machines, mini blow torches, automatic ice
| cream makers). There are thousands of available board games now
| compared to the 80s - and it is super easy to have specialty
| hobby items as they're cheap and readily available. If you went
| to the grocery store you'd see a far greater variety of
| vegetables, prepared foods, cheeses, meats, "exotic"
| ingredients etc.
|
| I think the big differences are around convenience, variety,
| and availability - and for whatever reason they don't feel
| quite as big, even though the work that goes into making that
| possible is astoundingly large and complex.
| FredPret wrote:
| Have a look at our GDP per capita graph and tell me again we're
| not more productive. We're working less and less and making more
| and more. Some of it is commercial and social innovation, but a
| lot is technology as well.
|
| I work as a specific type of tech consultant to medium-sized
| companies, and it's wondrous to behold how easy we can make many
| aspects of business. Critical functions that took multiple
| handshakes, paper mail, multiple mistakes, and at least a week
| now take pre-arranged agreements, API's, and they happen in maybe
| two seconds, almost always perfectly, and before anybody even
| realizes.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Writing or titling an article with an obviously false premise
| is an easy way to invoke emotions and get clicks.
|
| Sort of related to this:
|
| https://xkcd.com/386/
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| The phenomenon is also called Cunningham's Law:
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, for the lazy, there's a nice summary here:
|
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
|
| I've pre-selected a few lines because the problem is supposed
| to exist on the data of rich countries. You can deselect them
| at the blue bar at the top of the page (it's not obvious).
|
| I couldn't cut the data in any way that showed the issue ever
| existed. There is an half decade long decrease on the wealth of
| the poorer countries but nothing else on this graph.
|
| Anyway, "productivity" isn't GDP per capta. It's close to the
| GDP divided by the total worked hours. The fact that the GDP
| per capta is increasing (I didn't expect this) really puts the
| productivity problem in an entirely new light.
| DANK_YACHT wrote:
| The graph looks linear. If productivity gains were increasing
| (or even staying constant), you'd expect it to be more than
| linear. This implies the rate of productivity change is
| decreasing.
| angarg12 wrote:
| One thing I don't see mentioned often is that productivity in
| software development has skyrocketed, but it's hard to
| appreciate. Today's services are much more sophisticated and
| complex than just a decade ago. Even if some of that complexity
| is incidental and undesirable, it's undeniable that today a small
| team can pump out a much more refined app that entire companies
| did back then.
|
| This isn't only guess work, here is a real example: when I joined
| my first shop we had 2 sysadmin working full time to maintain a
| couple dozen servers. Over time they started introducing
| virtualization, automation, devops... by the end of my 7 year
| tenure, we had 250+ servers and only one sysadmin part time
| working on them. That's between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude
| improvement, and my company wasn't special by any means.
| kareemsabri wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious about this, and would like to see some
| data. When I started coding professionally the LAMP stack was
| the go-to, and your program would generally just do all the
| "work" in the context of a web request and then render an HTML
| page in response.
|
| Now, the systems are much more complex for sure (queues and
| asynchronous processing, event buses, microservices, multiple
| databases for different purposes) but I'm not sure that
| (functionality provided to business) / (number of developers)
| has increased all that much.
|
| Of course I could be dealing with a bias because as a novice
| programmer I worked on simpler programs and now I work on more
| complex / powerful programs.
| nine_k wrote:
| Look at: Google Maps, Figma, any advanced enough web mail,
| Office 360.
|
| Think about implementing these using the LAMP stack +
| Javascript from 2000.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You could also less charitably read that "growth" as using 250
| servers to do the same job you previously did with two. I guess
| that's growth for sever manufacturers, but I'd expect with more
| powerful hardware we'd need fewer servers, rather than more.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| what you're missing is customer numbers. If you go from 20
| servers to 200, and have 100x the customers, that's a massive
| win.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, but a person can write a paper just as well in Wordperfect
| 5 as the latest Google Doc or Office365 Word. How many millions
| of dev-hours have been expended on stuff that fundamentally
| doesn't do anything _new_?
|
| Edit: saying they don't do anything new isn't right. They do,
| especially with regards to collaboration. What I really mean is
| that they don't make the essential task -- the actual writing
| -- much easier. That's still human/mental work. Once you have
| come up with the words, putting the words into a document is
| the easy part.
| humanrebar wrote:
| Collaborative editing is an essential task in my job. Go back
| twenty years and folks were emailing copies of copies of
| drafts back and forth. Today, two authors use two keyboards
| and two screens and just type. That's very different.
| musicale wrote:
| > write a paper just as well in Wordperfect 5 as the latest
| Google Doc or Office365 Word
|
| Google docs and Overleaf have dramatically improved my
| collaborative writing workflow.
|
| Long-distance collaboration is also drastically cheaper and
| easier than it used to be.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Saying they don't do anything new isn't right.
|
| Perhaps it's possible that some people simply don't see the
| benefit of the newly added functionality, because they don't
| really use it?
|
| For example, personally I'd be served perfectly well with
| something like LibreOffice, so from my point of view, all of
| these new solutions do not indeed do much new (that I'd
| benefit from) and sometimes do things worse (cloud based
| platform with all the drawbacks that come with it vs local
| software in open formats).
|
| That's not to say that the point that you're making wouldn't
| be important, quite on the contrary - and even if the
| software doesn't do anything _new_ , even in those cases one
| can make an argument for refinement being a worthy pursuit
| (as long as it's not a useless rewrite).
|
| Perhaps text editing isn't the best example, given how
| different people's expectations can be in that regard.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > a person can write a paper just as well in Wordperfect 5 as
| the latest Google Doc or Office365 Word
|
| That seems hard to believe; try printing, or formatting. It's
| like saying 'a person can fly just as well in a 1930s biplane
| or a current 737.' Sure, they both fly.
|
| On the other hand, am I more productive in 2022 Emacs than I
| would be in 1985 Emacs?
| greggman3 wrote:
| what is the definition of productive? In 1985 I had a one month
| $1200 phone bill (well, the bill was to my dad) from calling my
| girlfriend on the other side of the country. I wrote letters to
| her on paper and sent them via snail mail.
|
| Today I video chat and play network games with my friend's 7yr
| old son 8000 kilometers away.
|
| In that same time I had an Atari 1200XL and it took several
| minutes to run the assembler to cross compile the C64 game I was
| working on. Today I can do far more impressive things from any
| browser just using jsfiddle/codepen and things run instantly.
|
| Today I can make music in Garageband, Ableton, and all the
| alternatives in minutes. In the mid 80s my dad had to use a 4
| track reel-to-reel with overdub and he had to be able to actually
| play all the instruments.
|
| Today I can grab blender/resolve/fusion and compete with almost
| any TV show on quality and broadcast my stuff for free on
| youtube. Vs in the 80s/90s when that would have taking a huge
| team of people and $$$$$$$$ in equipment plus access to either
| retail and VHS copies or access to broadcast gate keepers.
|
| Unreal/Unity have vastly increased productivity in games. Just go
| to any gamejam and look at how far people used to their tools can
| get in 2 days vs what they could make in the same amount of time
| in the mid-80s. Or look at the explosion of games on places like
| itch.io.
|
| Even typing documents. Typing in this textarea in HN is way
| easier than typing was on my Atari 800 in Atariwriter and the
| moment I press "add comment" it's published for all to see. Same
| with twitter/facebook/google docs/blogger/wordpress. Consider how
| much work and how many people it would have taking to do anything
| similar in the 80s. Write document, typeset document, get printer
| to print 1000s of copies, mail them to people, have mail people
| carry and deliver them....
|
| Contacting people in general and being able to send them
| documents, photos, videos, is free and trival today. Would have
| taken 10s of people and days to weeks just 40 yrs ago.
|
| Maybe "jobs" in general have not but lots of things have gotten
| incredibly easy, raising what is possible to produce (in
| otherwords, be productive)
| b0rsuk wrote:
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It is.
|
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
| LesZedCB wrote:
| Marx had a lot to say about this over 150 years ago...
|
| the answer lies in that technology absolutely _does_ make us more
| productive.
|
| the benefits of that reduction in cost, however, tend to move
| upward rather than downward, at least when it comes to labor
| value.
|
| this is basically chapter 1 from das kapital.
|
| of course, these kind of articles serve as propaganda by
| comflating ideas and watering down the critical analysis.
| turzmo wrote:
| Curious how productivity is measured. Tried skimming the
| associated government PDF from the article, but it is lost on me:
|
| "Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased 7.5 percent
| in the first quarter of 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
| reported today, as output decreased 2.4 percent and hours worked
| increased 5.5 percent"
|
| How is this "output" measured, and what does it include? Has it
| kept up with the times? If I produce more Furbies for cheaper,
| does this productivity number go up? What if I create an ad-
| supported iPhone game as a solo developer that reaches millions
| of people? Does that factor into "output" somehow? Is the
| accounting different if I sell the game on the App Store, without
| ads instead? Did an educational company that recorded VHS tapes
| of science lectures for schools count into productivity before,
| but now that there is high-quality "free" (ad-supported) content
| on the internet, that no longer is a producing segment of our
| economy?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| After a certain threshold, it is clear that human behavior
| exhibits many types of compensations, risk compensation as one,
| but I'm sure (from my personal experience) that there is
| productivity compensation.
|
| Analysis done over the last century across many countries show
| that everyone is working fewer hours per year as we transition
| from an agricultural to a knowledge based economy; this likely
| means that people want to relax and that new productivity gains
| will be compensated by fewer working hours and more relaxation.
| dbtc wrote:
| Perhaps because too much of it is designed to turn people into
| products, rather than producers.
| jacobedawson wrote:
| Another poster compared 1890 to 1950 - jumping from one to the
| other would be obviously shocking, from 1960 - 2020 perhaps less-
| so, physically.
|
| Still, I find it amazing that in 2022, I:
|
| - Work from home via the internet with people I've never met -
| Visit places I've never been in simulated 3D to build familiarity
| - Receive exact routes to virtually anywhere from a computer in
| my pocket - Video call with my family in real-time literally from
| one side of the planet to another. - Have Copilot autocompleting
| repetitive lines of code for me with (ok, 60% - 70% of the
| time..) incredible prescience - Get real-time translation of
| foreign text from a printed page
|
| Those are just some of the the most common examples from my daily
| life. The productivity gains are real, at least for me
| personally.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I'm still inclined to mostly agree with OP who said that a
| visitor from 1880 to 1950 would be far more in awe than a
| visitor from 1950 to 2020, but it is funny sometimes how
| incredulous my kids are when I tell them that, for example,
| there was literally no way to open up a device that told you
| where you were when I was growing up.
| rybosworld wrote:
| This is such a dumb article.
| koliber wrote:
| Productivity has grown! But not for everyone, sadly.
|
| Some people are now magnitudes more productive than they were
| before. But that requires an understanding of technology, and a
| drive for improving tools, process, and themselves. The people
| who can do this effectively are reaping the productivity
| benefits.
|
| Sadly, not everyone is. Some people don't want to do it. Many
| don't have access to the the instruction that would allow them to
| unlock these productivity gains. Many productivity tools continue
| to suffer from usability issues, which limit who can harness
| them.
|
| I'm an optimist. The past has show that eventually, most people
| can benefit from productivity gains. It takes time for tools to
| become easy enough for the majority to benefit from them. It's
| happening all around us.
| ausbah wrote:
| is this something limited to software engineering ? other
| specific fields? practices like communication?
| pdimitar wrote:
| Replying only to the title:
|
| Because nobody wants to be "the idiot who pays for innovation
| from which all our competitors will also benefit". It's like the
| arms race that the countries all over the world do; you might
| swear to everything that's holy you're peaceful but you don't
| know if your neighbor is an a-hole so you arm yourself just in
| case.
|
| The amount of handy scripts and clever engineering solutions I've
| come up with in personal and freelance projects beats any
| salaried work creativity by 10x, if not 50x even. Regularly.
|
| But after 20 years in the profession I learned not to offer these
| solutions in my regular work. The other programmers will
| mercilessly rip apart any of your ideas and will ask for
| literally every other way for you to do it and not the one you
| suggested. Nevermind that it's none of their damned business how
| I deliver the end result (I mean if it does NOT involve code to
| maintain in the future -- obviously).
|
| It's weird. Guess we have some very common and stereotypical
| weaknesses?
|
| But whatever the case, I gradually learned to keep my mouth shut
| and get the job done by any means necessary.
|
| It's better to ask for an apology than for permission, I have
| found empirically.
| doubleocherry wrote:
| Generally, because of Conway's law:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
| lmkg wrote:
| Also, because of Sturgeon's Law:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
| pwthornton wrote:
| And my axe.
| [deleted]
| bmitc wrote:
| Most of today's technology keeps us busy but does not make us
| more productive.
|
| Productivity via the hand of technology requires a true
| commitment to develop technology that augments human activity
| rather than replace it. Since that is most certainly not what we
| do with modern technology, we end up with systems that poorly
| replace humans _and_ provide terrible interfaces between humans
| and those systems. Thus, it keeps us busy but not productive.
|
| With regard to consumer technology, it is explicitly designed to
| keep consumers more busy than productive. A productive consumer
| gets in the pool and gets out. A busy consumer gets in the pool
| and stays there until the skin wrinkles and still lingers.
| gz5 wrote:
| The gains are there but are mainly realized by the winning
| companies - I don't think they could have scaled like this
| otherwise?
|
| + Microsoft went from about $25B in annual revenue to ~200B in
| the past 20 years.
|
| + Apples currently holds about $200B in cash.
| gumby wrote:
| I was rather disappointed in Lohr (author of this piece) as he is
| smart and was around in the 1990s for Solow's famous quip "We see
| the computer age everywhere except in the productivity
| statistics".
|
| In the age of the desktop computer the iPhone would have been a
| flop (especially in the US's then-backwards wireless
| environment). It takes time for people to understand a new
| capability and for it to reach the point where it's worth
| ditching current practice. My aging parents still like to have a
| meeting (with their lawyer for example) that could have been a
| phone call or even email; they still visit the bank in person
| etc. I can't be bothered with any of that.
|
| The call center makes a good example: I have seen a company that
| uses machine learning to make the _outbound_ call: it can wait
| patiently on hold and even do some transactions with the human in
| the call center. Things like that don't show up in the stats yet;
| the real change will be replacing most of the call center ppl
| with an API, and with the humans there to handle the _really_
| hard problems.
| ebiester wrote:
| Recently, with my husband's work, I saw three one-hour meetings
| turn into over 200 emails because someone doing the work
| refused to get on the phone and misunderstood the written word.
|
| I am skeptical that email is that much more productive for many
| people.
| bsmith wrote:
| Depends on the context. Just yesterday, I called the city
| parking, because I had made a payment the previous day, but I
| never received confirmation. After the separate ten minute
| queues just to be hung up on really frustrated me. I sent a
| short email to an email address I could find, and they fixed
| my issue within two hours of sending it.
| jseliger wrote:
| I've observed similar issues:
| https://seliger.com/2015/08/02/how-computers-have-made-
| grant...
|
| Lowering the friction of process often results in more
| process, but not more result.
| Theitheave42 wrote:
| For sure! I'm definitely hoping to see more workers and
| employees used to short conference calls while growing up on
| Skype and Discord. So perhaps as the new generations come
| into the workforce we'll see it much more. Definitely seems
| like I'm much more efficient with my peers while discussing
| stuff over voice than text.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > refused to get on the phone
|
| So your solution to this attitude is to insist more on
| meetings and phone calls ?
|
| Did anyone ask that person why they came to hate getting on
| the phone that much ?
| gumby wrote:
| Although I've been using networked email as a primary
| communications channel for my entire computing life (since
| ~1978), I did work for a couple of large companies before it
| was widely adopted and you simply cannot imagine the amount
| of infrastructure required to produce and move physical paper
| documents around, not to mention disseminating mass
| communications. Moving that all online was a _massive_
| improvement, even with its drawbacks.
|
| Now it's been ubiquitous for a while, people now try to deal
| with the drawbacks.
| samatman wrote:
| The cliche of 'started in the mailroom' is expired by now
| but it was there for a reason. Businesses had a whole
| division whose job was to collect, shuffle, and deliver
| manila envelopes. Someone would come around with a push
| cart and drop them in the inbox.
|
| Working in the mailroom was an entry-level, menial job, but
| one which rewarded intelligence and afforded a unique view
| into the function of the company.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Email has its place for lower priority communication where
| fast response and interaction is not important.
|
| Text chat is good for interaction but it can bog down with a
| lot of back and forth and sometimes the meaning is hard to
| get across. The latency while better than email is still slow
| and people will often not ask questions that they should.
|
| When those channels are not enough I'll initiate a quick
| voice/video call with one or a few people to go over a
| specific topic. Generally we can clarify the situation
| through some quick questions and answers. The latency is low
| and answers often invoke other questions. You can usually
| reach an agreement very quickly that way.
| mikkergp wrote:
| The call center seems to be like the standard MBA case of a
| cost center to optimize but where efficiency is only half
| correlated with positive customer experience. I mean if you can
| route people to the right place, and get peoples questions
| answered quickly it's great, but that leaves a long tail of
| people in the nightmare situation of digging through phone
| trees, dealing with untrained staff, or having someone try to
| cut a call short rather than give you the best experience.
| bombcar wrote:
| The only real advance in call center tech in the last twenty
| years (imo) has been the "press 1 to be called back in the
| order your call was received".
| I_dev_outdoors wrote:
| My dentist has a PBX setup so that when you call and you
| don't get anyone or leave a voicemail, you get a link in a
| SMS with a link to schedule a call back.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Because it is the wrong technology. Take project managent Saas
| for example. Every single one of them don't focus on the big
| picture. Not a single one tries to make users effective instead
| of efficient.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Manafacturing productivity is though the roof. PCBs are
| incredibly cheap now, and lead times are in days. Micros that can
| do almost anything, bristling with peripherals and programmable
| in C or even just running Linux, rather than hand assembly or
| discrete circuits. Dedicated devices that cost cents handle tasks
| that used to take organisations months and months to design. All
| sorts of materials make things that used to be impossible
| routine. Machine control of all sorts is mind-blowing in
| precision, reliability and speed. You can get things lasered,
| printed, sintered, cast, moulded, routed, milled, waterjetted,
| EDMed, whatever, at prices and turnarounds that would have been
| complete fantasy in the past.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I was thinking something similar (if narrower). In my universe
| (embedded systems), we have entire BLE stacks-in-a-box shipped
| to us by manufacturers now. That would have been inconceivable
| 20 years ago. Now more than ever, peripherals can be
| interconnected using a little bit-twiddling, automating a lot
| of the system logic that would have been handled explicitly in
| the past.
|
| To be fair, none of that matters if we aren't actually doing
| useful things with the fancy microcontrollers.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am actually writing a book about this - and my thesis is
| "software literacy". Software is a form of literacy and people
| need to a) be literate b) have tools and permissions and culture
| to allow people to basically code their own solutions.
|
| Most large companies have a sort of process-killing-glass-ceiling
| where only excel spreadsheets can pass through.
| akrymski wrote:
| What a joke, I'm literally reading this while my robot vacuum is
| cleaning the house.
| orcul wrote:
| A much better question would be: given all this new tech, why
| aren't we working less?
| jaqalopes wrote:
| The rich people who own the tech are, you and I are not.
| kkfx wrote:
| ...Because new technology is not build for us but against us for
| a little group of IT giants interests... Simply.
|
| Classic desktops are for productivity BUT they do not generate
| enough lock-in nor give their main devs such a tight grip as
| actual systems and so on.
|
| Unfortunately to understand people need to know both models,
| witch is highly unlikely outside IT techies community and even
| unlikely inside it...
| deanCommie wrote:
| There is an infamous anecdote from the turn/mid of the 20th
| century:
|
| People believed that innovations in vacuum cleaners, washing
| machines, etc would cause people to have more leisure time
| because of how much time it saved in cleaning.
|
| But it didn't happen. Why?
|
| Because people's expectations for hygiene and cleanliness went
| up. And as it became easier to clean houses and clothes, people
| were more comfortable with having larger houses, and more
| clothes.
|
| Technology innovation is much the same way. As capabilities
| increase so do expectations. And the "economy" is all about
| expectations and aspirations.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| except it did save a lot of time. Have you ever tried to wash
| clothes by hand? Increased standard of living counts in terms
| of increased productivity.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Exactly. We have a lot more free time, we've just raised our
| leisure standards (dining out more frequently, traveling more)
| and come up with more forms of entertainment (social media,
| streaming platforms, gaming). That this sounds to most of us
| like a wasted opportunity might be because these things are not
| very fulfilling, or it might just be the hedonic treadmill.
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