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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

Productivity as a whole had been in a downtrend every year since it peaked in 2003

Where is the source for this? What is the source for the "long term decline" mentioned in the article?

The first sentence mentions the BLS, so I went there, and this is not what they say. https://www.bls.gov/data/#productivity

If you dont want to go through the various data, here are some articles with charts:

This one covers since the last recession: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/below-trend-the-us-pro...

This one goes back further, but only up until 2012: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-3/what-can-labor-product...

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Meetings, meetings, more meetings and meetings about meetings, meetings about making meetings productive, etc. We need fewer of them and the ones we do have should have a point (i.e. decisive)

They shouldn't by default be thinking out loud brainstorming sessions to be investigated and possibly executed later some day after it's trickled through proper approval requiring additional meetings.

Here's what I don't get about this though, was there less meetings back in the early 2000s? I'm only 24 so I don't know, but if there is one thing I feel has been passed down from seniors as a software developer it is that in the early 2000s managers loved holding meetings.

You're right, there have been companies plagued by meetings for a long time. The difference is the kind of work we do. Now it's mostly "knowledge work" and service work. Parkinson's law--work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion--is probably the culprit these days. As long as people can complete their jobs before the deadlines, they will also tend their virtual farms and talk about nothing with their coworkers at the virtual water cooler on Slack. It's no longer cool for employers to tell their workers to get back to work and stop talking and playing games.

Excellent point. Let's schedule a meeting to discuss this further.

Productivity measures how much money economy produce per hour of work. It depends mostly on type of industries and such and little on how persobally productive white collar worker is.

The graphs you linked clearly show that the growth is declining.

"Productivity growth is declining" doesn't mean "productivity is declining"

The red line here is going upwards and to the right, but its slope is decreasing:

https://imgur.com/a/M2T7C

The article title (not the HN title) is "Productivity in the US Continues to Decline" which one could interpret as "productivity is declining" because that's what it says.

But you're right and they should've been more clear about it in the article. Thanks for the proper HN title.

People will generally be interested in "real productivity", which subtracts inflation. That will make that graph distinctly negative.

I'm not disagreeing but I'm adding the context.

The article is dated May 5, 2016. There was apparently a -1.0% drop in productivity according to the May 4, 2016 BLS news release, but it doesn't seem to be the worst quarter since 1993. In fact, the same article revised the previous quarter's productivity down from a number that was already lower than the May 5 number, so the author seems to be BSing. The BLS timeseries for nonfarm business appears to show 2008Q1 as the worst quarter-to-quarter drop in the span from 1991 to 2017. The worst quarter drop since 1947Q2, was -11.3% in 1947Q3 which was followed by a 17.9% increase in 1947Q4. The data are pretty noisy.

Most of the charts in the BLS articles you mention do show productivity growth in 2009-2017 lagging far behind the trendlines for previous business cycles. The BLS articles are good for putting productivity on an index which I think makes a better comparison than looking at a rise or drop from quarter to quarter. I have read a number of economists who are concerned about the drop in productivity growth, although there hasn't been a persistent drop in total productivity.

Here's the raw data on productivity growth visualized in FRED:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MPU4910063

The author missed the small peak in productivity around the recession but the main premise of the article stands - productivity growth has hit a wall in recent years.

No it doesn't stand, and your link doesn't back up the article.

Your chart shows an increase every single year. Not one data point on that chart shows a decline.

The rate of growth is declining and near zero.

The author is sloppy with his terms but I never claimed that aggregate productivity is decreasing, just growth rate

Protip: get your stats from FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MPU4910063

He probably means the rate of increase is falling? Or he doesn't care and just wants to complain about these kids with their damn eye-phones...

Ok, we'll add a question mark to the title above unless/until someone finds a clear answer to this.

The author of the article confuses productivity with productivity growth (the rate of change in productivity). While productivity growth has generally declined in recent years, the rate of change has been positive. Consequently, productivity itself has continued to increase (albeit at a declining rate).

Another comment provided a link to the St. Louis Fed’s chart of productivity growth, which illustrates this [0].

From skimming the article, it doesn’t appear to address some of the hypothesized causes of this trend, including insufficiency in the definition of productivity to reflect Information Age work and arguments that the internet has less of a multiplier effect on the productivity of labor than other inventions (electricity, combustion engine, etc.)

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MPU4910063

Ok, I've taken out '?' and put in 'growth'.

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