I’m trying to figure out how productivity rates could possibly be construed as the only important metric for what constitutes “the future.” Doesn’t that sound like a paperclip maximizer kind of perspective? Am I missing something?
In the same way, the invention and adoption of all those things created a condition of poverty in the previously normal people who didn’t have them.
Wealthy people purpose the majority of their time themselves. Poor people have most of their time purposed for them.
When viewed this way, we see poverty is rampant here, even though many people have the various baubles and trinkets our modern society can produce.
Desiring full time employment is the double edged sword. The robots do the work for you but you still want to work and you want to do the "productive" part.
Part of this is an uneven global distribution of productivity gains, but even in developed countries there is plenty of room for innovation to stabilize prices and prevent shocks.
For a comparison across countries, see figure 6 in
https://www.fb.org/market-intel/u.s.-food-expenditures-at-ho...
FWIW, I agree that the focus on productivity at the exclusion of everything else is bad, the point of productivity is to live well, but I think there's a lot of the world that doesn't live well, and I think it is perhaps a failure of imagination to not believe that we could live better as well.
Extremely cheap labor improves productivity numbers.
World GDP per capita last year was about 10,000USD.
Surely a globally equal society at that level of wealth is preferable to what we have now.
Focusing on equality is a distraction. If the poor are at the same level of poverty over 20 years, it doesn't matter whether the rich got richer or poorer. The fact is the poor are getting richer too, just not as quickly as the rich.
I'm not a free market ideologue. I'm just a practical person. If any system proves to be better at lifting up the poor I'll take it. Currently it seems a largely capitalist system with welfare and healthcare is a highly effective system. Certainly more effective than systems which try to destroy the markets.
It's safe to say the U.S. does a terrible job providing for it's citizens given the wealth of the country, but the European states we often hold up as models have gdp's per capita that are 4 or 5 times 10,000USD. That seems like the bare minimum we'd want to shoot for, rather than ensuring that everyone in the world lives like the fine people in Namibia.
Our biggest productivity gains came from burning coal, then oil. Productivity only started being sightly decoupled from oil usage since the early-mid 2010s.
We have something like 3 billion more who can't afford a washing machine. Think about the waste of human potential that is.
Not to mention that we have to get it so that all girls receive 13 years of schooling (that will help with global warming, as educated women have less children and at a later date). Not doing so is, again, a massive waste of human potential.
Both of these requires more resources, not fewer. We need more productivity, not less.
It actually just requires better distribution of the food. We've had enough food to feed everyone on the planet since the 1970s.
The owner class disagreed, and high productivity just meant higher profits because many more (increasingly lower quality) widgits are made per worker-hour.
But just look at that GDP!!
You are not living a 20th century lifestyle. You don't sit in a mostly wooden building with minimal electricity or gas lighting with reading and radio as your primary entertainment.
At the very least you now have a computer that was certainly manufactured and assembled on the other half of the globe and transported to you. You likely have a lot of electrical appliances like ovens, a fridge, AC, and hot water.
You likely don't live 3 or 4 generations to a 1000sq ft house.
That we work the same in general has more to do with (imo positive) lifestyle inflation than some evil banker sitting on their slightly larger boat than the one you own.
Your computer does _different_ stuff than a lathe. We need both computers and lathes in modern life.
GDP, which is what we were talking about, can rise forever because those who benefit will find ways to make it rise. Like, say, coupling difficult-to-access healthcare to it! Hey, now healthcare is a full fourth of it! Selling real estate and insurance to one another helps it increase, too! Line go up!! Something tells me that greater productivity allowed this cool and normal situation of proliferating middlemen to occur.
The existence of relatively inexpensive ovens, etc, has been the case since easily 1970, which is around when productivity started to decouple from benefits to citizenry.
I assume you're assured of this perspective because the existence of your boat makes you uncomfortable with the idea that we're using the insane productivity gains our species has realized to be gainfully employed not doing anything material or beneficial, but rather tricking people into clicking on ads. I understand whose shoulders I stand on, and I also understand that we don't really have to have the underpaid underclass to whom the ads are shown, we've just decided this way is better.
Right because you are now importing prefab assemblies produced from other countries, and using off the shelf bulk produced components like drywall. That supply chain DOES require significantly more people.
> Hey, now healthcare is a full fourth of it!
Well I guess you could go destroy the MRI machines that require a steady pure helium stream, unplug the 400+ computerized monitors that are centrally linked back to nurses stations, or get rid of all the neat robotics that allow non-invasive surgery and save some cash. We could go back to when medicine ended at what your local doctor could do by hand.
> Something tells me that greater productivity allowed this cool and normal situation of proliferating middlemen to occur.
Please go share this opinion with your real estate brokers. Ask them what they do with all their free time that they have so much of apparently.
> The existence of relatively inexpensive ovens, etc, has been the case since easily 1970, which is around when productivity started to decouple from benefits to citizenry.
Cheap per unit doesn't mean cheap to produce from scratch. You can't go buy a machine shop and crank out modern ovens. Let's not even get into safety testing.
> I assume you're assured of this perspective because the existence of your boat makes you uncomfortable with the idea that we're using the insane productivity gains our species has realized to be gainfully employed not doing anything material or beneficial
Not a boat guy, sorry.
You are about a hundred years behind in your understanding of economics. Production doesn't mean spinning yarn in your cottage. The broker managing real estate contracts is doing work the same way the person assembling surgical robots is doing. Life is no longer about building wooden cabins on land you claimed by fencing it off only to have your house burn down when your open top oil lamp turns over and catches your flammable ass bedding. Humanity has had progress since then.
> I also understand that we don't really have to have the underpaid underclass to whom the ads are shown,
If you don't like Hulu's business model then stop watching it.
>Right because you are now importing prefab assemblies produced from other countries, and using off the shelf bulk produced components like drywall. That supply chain DOES require significantly more people.
Yet those people pump out much more per worker.
>Well I guess you could go destroy the MRI machines that require a steady pure helium stream, unplug the 400+ computerized monitors that are centrally linked back to nurses stations, or get rid of all the neat robotics that allow non-invasive surgery and save some cash. We could go back to when medicine ended at what your local doctor could do by hand.
Why assume that I meant "destroy everything good"? Why not just remove the insane proliferation of profit-seeking middlemen in Merican healthcare? Pretty much every other first world country manages this fine, and uses less money to get better outcomes! How's the US life expectancy, again?
>Please go share this opinion with your real estate brokers. Ask them what they do with all their free time that they have so much of apparently.
Where did you get the idea that I'm saying that they have free time? They're very busy selling one another houses, and they are able to busily perform this profoundly useless economic "activity" because our society needs so little physical manpower to continue, as compared to, say, that of the 20th century.
>Cheap per unit doesn't mean cheap to produce from scratch. You can't go buy a machine shop and crank out modern ovens. Let's not even get into safety testing.
No, but it means cheap per unit.
>Not a boat guy, sorry.
So why assume that I am? It makes you look like an asshole!
>You are about a hundred years behind in your understanding of economics. Production doesn't mean spinning yarn in your cottage. The broker managing real estate contracts is doing work the same way the person assembling surgical robots is doing. Life is no longer about building wooden cabins on land you claimed by fencing it off only to have your house burn down when your open top oil lamp turns over and catches your flammable ass bedding. Humanity has had progress since then.
You've convinced me! It's about building disposable surveillance-economy "smart"phones, ignoring externalities, and quantitative easing!!
>If you don't like Hulu's business model then stop watching it.
Ooh, nice watch! Did you buy it with your salary that you're implying is greater than mine? It really adds to your argument! ...hey, weren't you just implying that I own a boat?
https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/33080/dimensio... sort of clears some stuff up. Economists are not that good at dimensional analysis, despite their worship of physicists, and every physicist knowing dimensional analysis is key to staying sane.
GDP, for the purposes of this graph, is stuff measured in dollars, per time, so "value"/time. The estimates are not that different from linear regressions, asymptotically. That's it.
"Productivity" is a nebulous concept. Ultimately, we only "see" the value in the market price of things being exchanged, so productivity is thus reasoning backwards with division/differentiation. There is no empirically rigorous notion of per-person productivity to integrate over, and whether the ability to divide/differential makes that platonically-valid concept nonetheless a murky philosophical debate one need not get into to understand this graph.
We have an aging population so more productivity will be welcome.