No Great Technological Stagnation (2016) | Hacker News Reader

No Great Technological Stagnation (2016)

nintil.com

43 pointsHooke7 comments

Quite a lot to digest, even the reference links are still interesting.

I find it interesting when reading things like the headwinds identified on 186-187 (or pages 2-3 as the pdf reader counts them) of the document linked early on in the article [0]. It is a welcome break from data light world of politics and encouraging to see people talking about the parts of the future that are unlikely to be rosy.

Curious really that nobody fingers the bank bailouts from thing like the '07-'08 financial crisis as a risk to long-term growth. The financial companies determine where the money flows to and the crisis can be interpreted as the the economy signaling that the money managers are incompetent. Propping the system up with bailouts and QE probably does real harm over the long term, as people are incentivised to do things that have been proven not to work.

[0] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Interactives...

Great read! If you accept both his evidence that tech is accelerating AND the consensus thesis that productivity growth is slowing, then the simplest explanation is that there is a separate, fast-growing phenomenon that saps economic productivity.

Anyone want to propose what that is and share some measurements?

I’ll offer some speculation with no data to back it up: quality of life is good enough that after a certain threshold of wealth people aren’t willing to work extra hours any more. See: Europe & bigco tech jobs.

I think that’s true. Most people just want a comfortable life. Only a few will always want more.

And out of these few, how much would prefer to put their efforts towards goals of their choosing, instead of exchanging labor for money via whatever task someone else is willing to pay for?

My guess: Playing on our phones. I have no measurements to back it up, though.

Productivity is calculated based on GDP. It's possible that GDP doesn't measure the amount of goods and services we produce.

For example, say we manufacture 2x the number of units(with the same amount of employees), but for half the price per unit. GDP will remain the same, but still, we've doubled our productivity.

A second explanation(that i've seen data supporting it): good tech only improves the productivity of some of the companies, while many companies don't adopt the tech in full, and so enjoy limited to no benefits.

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