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Comment by ksdale | Hacker News Reader

Productivity is basically a measure of how much stuff we get per person. Obviously stuff isn't the only thing that matters, but once upon a time, everyone had to spend all of their time growing food. Now farming is 1,000 times more productive, and most everyone can do something else. The same with making clothes, furniture, etc. If we want a world where everyone can spend all of their time doing whatever they want and have enough, we're going to need a much more productive world.

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There is an obvious gain when agriculture gets 1000x more productive, but there has to be a point where it becomes diminishing returns. How many more times will making agriculture 10x more productive noticeably improve people’s lives? At some point productivity has to stop being the only metric. I have a feeling productivity gains have already hit that point and the primary benefactor to further improvement is the producers.

Based on food prices and the % of world income spent on food amongst the lowest income quartiles, another 10x or 100x would noticeably improve the lives of a large number of people.

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...

We're very privileged to be able to wonder when enough productivity is enough. A huge portion of the world's population still lives in abject poverty and increased productivity would absolutely benefit them. And I think there were people 100 years ago making the same argument as you, that technology had advanced far enough that there was no need for more.

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.

I find it rather ridiculous to view the inequities of society as a problem that should be solved by increasing productivity. I absolutely have a feeling that some of our biggest productivity gains have come on the backs of and sometimes maybe at the cost of worse quality of life in some parts of the world.

Extremely cheap labor improves productivity numbers.

If you take gdp numbers and divide them out among the population of the entire world, you get a world in poverty. Though I agree that many of the gains are ill-gotten. There's still nowhere near enough in absolute terms, though. Enough food, but not enough housing, electricity, clean water, appliances...

> If you take gdp numbers and divide them out among the population of the entire world, you get a world in poverty.

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.

There's an assumption baked into capitalism that growing the pie is more important than fussing over dividing the pie. This has historically held true.

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.

I'm not sure about that at all. I assume you don't sit around thinking that you have several times the amount of income that you need, or that your taxes should be several times what they are now?

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.

>> I absolutely have a feeling that some of our biggest productivity gains have come on the backs of and sometimes maybe at the cost of worse quality of life in some parts of the world.

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 a billion people on earth who do not have enough to eat (living below the UN poverty line). That has to change, and that requires even more productive farms.

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.

> We have a billion people on earth who do not have enough to eat (living below the UN poverty line). That has to change, and that requires even more productive farms.

It actually just requires better distribution of the food. We've had enough food to feed everyone on the planet since the 1970s.

Productivity also drives inequality. It’s at least a double edged sword.

Are you suggesting it would be better if everyone were poor instead of just some people?

Poverty is relative to your contemporaries. What does it mean to be poor in a developed country today? Flush toilets, a thermostat, a cell phone, probably even a car. A thousand calories from McDonalds for half an hour's labor. You'd be the envy of world history. Yet you're very obviously poor, because of the even better stuff that other people have.

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.

So that's a yes?

Good for material conditions, bad for social conditions. How you balance those is your political alignment.

There is another measure of wealth and that is time.

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.

Productivity decreases demand for full time employment.

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.

We measure equality wrong. We measure it on income, but should measure it on what we can get for it. And that way we are more equal now than we have ever been. A cheap car is better, more fuel efficient and safer than a good car was 20 years ago. Poor people can get treatment for AIDS today, something rich people couldn't 30 years ago.

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