Comment by ryangittins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryangittins | Hacker News Reader

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I'm a little ignorant on this subject so please forgive me, but does the measurement of productivity account for advances in technology?

With modern software I can produce the output of hundreds of people from the 1960s orders of magnitude faster. Does that make me more productive? I mean, it does in terms of output, but not input. I'm not really working harder. I'm not really even working smarter. I'm just working on the shoulders of giants.

If I hired a guy to paint a room and gave him a 1-inch wide paintbrush it would take him significantly longer than a guy with a 2-foot wide paint roller. Is the second guy more productive? He does the same thing in less time. If you pay him hourly, you pay him less. You pay less for the same output. He's not working harder. He's just using better tools.

Again, I'm totally ignorant on what exactly "productivity" means in this context. Perhaps this is a well-understood facet of the problem and it is accounted for.

This is a good question, and I actually don't know the way they calculate this exactly (except what my sibling said about GDP vs workforce). What I can point out is something in your analogy that I think generalizes, and demonstrates part of the issue:

Realistically, across an entire company or economy you're going to hire a lot more 1-inch paint brush people to paint your rooms. So instead of having a dude with a roller doing it alone, you have 2 or 3 people with brushes, maybe working in shifts to get it done.

It's obviously more efficient to use the one guy with the roller, but what if he gets sick? It used to be that Alice, Bob and Candice were all working together. Alice could cover for Bob if Bob got sick or needed to bring his kid to the dentist. Now it's all Steve, and Steve feels the pressure to GET SHIT DONE, because there's no one else to do it. He'll work while sick, his kid won't make it to the dentist.

So sure he's more productive. But back in the day, with the shift work, even if the naive calculation indicates that input effort per employee was the same, you have these soft factors that made quality of life way higher.

And that's without even getting into cost of living/inflation stuff, nevermind student debt. People are hurting out there.

Productivity is kinda like GDP normalized against how many people were actually working. So if global war or famine destroyed your working population but your GDP stayed the same afterwards, that would represent an increased productivity.

From [1], "... labor productivity measures the amount of real gross domestic product (GDP) produced by an hour of labor"

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-productivity.asp

The problem with that is labor is moving out of the economic system. Much more at the bottom than near the top where programmer laborers work, but it'll get here.

For example, walmart doesn't pay for employees food anymore because food stamps/EBT aka taxpayers pay for their employees food. Their labor no longer has a dollar value of food or their labor no longer pays for food, sorta. Their employees have left the legacy dollar based food marketplace. Similar things go on with medical care and no bennie jobs. If you believe in the new urbanism religion then people no longer own cars anymore, cars are certainly very expensive and basically unaffordable to the working poor, and someone else is funding the unprofitable mass transit systems... for now. Certainly people who can't afford cars are no longer part of the car economy.

The ultimate extreme of income inequality would be something like the last two unmerged corporations in the USA merge, creating trillions in merger fees as part of the GDP, which divided across many McJob hours would appear to make us all fabulously wealthy, but all the money is located somewhere else, and we all get our food from EBT and health care from medicare and housing has govt assistance leading to most people not really being involved in the legacy economy anymore.

Its not as far fetched as you'd think. There's only 100M full time jobs for 320M people. Two thirds of people live off one third of the people still working. That ratio will increase with automation.

I think that's the entire point. There's no inherent value attributed to labor except as a piece of the value produced. For the paintbrush example, you just want your room painted and a price you're willing to pay. When the benefits of productivity are largely captured by the management class, which then hires less people, that's having your cake and eating it, too.

It's an economics term. Basically, how much output to you get for a given amount of input. It's more about the market value of the components than about how much physical stuff was produced.

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