Productivity has fallen, and experts are puzzled. I’m not. We’re all just tired
latimes.com
latimes.com
Plumbers aren't plumbing slower than they were before. They look less productive because they have to spend more on gas. And the $100 an hour, or whatever, of economic output is discounted more than it should be because of how we measure inflation.
Businesses may also be more staffed up than the same quarter a year ago.
Productivity is up over last quarter but down compared to the same quarter a year ago, when businesses were complaining about being understaffed (the enhanced unemployment ended in September of Q3 2021). Did the delta outbreak also depress hours worked and juice the health sector's contributions to GDP or hurt it because there are more profitable procedures?
All I can say is output is not adjusted for prices.
https://www.bls.gov/k12/productivity-101/content/how-is-prod...
Adjusted for price changes being the key word.
The BLS isn't measuring the number of pipes plumbed. They're counting the dollars that plumbers make and using that number to determine their output. To compare that output across time you have to discount for inflation. If you calculate too high a rate of inflation then you discount too much
This Fed opinion piece has some great points related to your point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394486
That author found much of the latest growth in profits attributable to reduction in corporate taxes and not much else. This latest might be a reversion to a market preference for lower P/E ratios. That would look like lower productivity even with the same earnings and thus actual productivity, a clear contradiction.
But be careful here. The next thing to write about after headlines of lowered productivity are lowered wages.
Case example: the airline industry took COVID bailout money and used it for stock buybacks, while laying off large numbers of pilots and other employees due to low demand for air travel at the height of the pandemic. As demand surged recently, more and more flights were canceled (~75% decrease in number of flights) and this created a huge revenue drop so technically, 'productivity per worker' declined. Layoffs resulted in a 'increase in per-worker productivity', but now, mnay airlines don't have the necessary staff to run their businesses smoothly, so their revenue is suffering, passengers flights are getting cancelled, and labor is calling for strikes.
Gross mismanagement 101.
It doesn't take geniuses to realize the money isn't being distributed equally. Yeah productivity has fallen -- it was the only lever regular workers have.
Why take on added stress when it doesnt turn into shared success?
The bosses want more for less. Politicians want to just import overseas labor (whom they treat as semi-slaves) so they can reduce salaries and working conditions for everyone ("work more or else i'll replace you with a lower paid H1 that I can abuse because they are desperate")
SHARED SUCCESS will magically fix productivity issues.
Everybody wants more for less. Systems based on self-sacrifice don't work.
Self-sacrifice doesn't mean you get zero reward or that reward is evenly distributed, it means everyone gives of themselves to improve the whole, whatever that is in context. You're part of the whole, so regardless of your position in it you benefit indirectly.
The converse is a parasitic/extractive relationship, where your objective is to consume/destroy as much of the whole as possible to improve your own perceived standing relative to others. See Sears, most private equity firms, Kanye's recent antics, and arguably some of what Elon's doing with Twitter.
At a large-scale, democracies work because they incentivize/force self-centered assholes to act in self-sacrificing manners in order to satisfy their greed.
> A lot of successful startups
None are staffed by people deliberately working at a loss.
Self-sacrifice is about deliberately working for a below-market salary for the benefit of others.
Family units are selfishly motivated - the propagation of their genes.
The military can and will kick your ass, it doesn't need to be efficient to do that.
The Gates foundation is well known for making progress on eradicating polio, among other measures.
If we're defining self-sacrifice as deliberately working for a below-market salary for the benefit of others, you just defined pretty much every high-skill government employee. Every FBI agent, every general, every agency staffer could almost certainly make more in the private sector. Many of them stay out of a sense of duty and service, and because they want their work to be meaningful.
I don't know how you don't say startups aren't staffed by people deliberately working at a loss. Almost by default startups pay less in salary with the vague promise of outsized gains on company stock when it goes public. Startups are also often started by idealists who want to try and put a vision out there into the world, and are willing to make giant sacrifice to achieve that vision. Usually that vision involves improving other peoples' lives in some way "making the world a better place" and all that.
If you want to drill down deep enough any action that produces emotional reward is selfishly motivated, by that logic the only selfless actions are the ones that make us miserable without any hope of a reward, which is a very useless way to define selflessness as it excludes nearly all human activity.
A startup where there is a single class of stock with no shortcuts for anyone to vesting.
The only solution to this psychological problem is the construction of systems where it's not possible for the person taking more to tell the people they are taking from to "get used to it."
Systems where everyone gets the same pay are also invariably viewed as unfair by the people who know they produce more than others.
The fair price is when the price is set by Supply&Demand. All attempts otherwise produce worse results.
Nah, not necessary. You just need to show a counter-example.
Also, please learn about universal quantification. It should be covered by any computer science course.
This seems like a simplistic model. The modern workplace has all sorts of gotchas. For example, what happened at DataRobot: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/as-datarobot-struggl...
Lets assume everyone was paid fairly. What good is it if only the top folks could obtain liquidity on shares while everyone held on down the roller coaster of 2022?
By the same people telling us inflation is happening because wages were going up/workers had more leverage, not price gouging by oil companies and such.
The other type of inflation happens when prices go up because the amount of supply drops -- people and businesses bid up on critical inputs like toilet paper and manufacturing process inputs.
So while it's true that an economy can experience inflation when "the government prints money", it's also true that factors that lead to reductions in raw materials and intermediates (like a war between the 1st and 4th grain producers) will tend to cause prices to rise.
If you have to spend more on X, that means you have less to spend on Y. Because of the Law of Supply&Demand, the reduced demand for Y results in a corresponding drop in the price of Y.
That's why it's not inflation.
A downstream consumer of your cans will either see their prices rise for their inputs (your cans) and call it inflation, or they will have to source additional cans from additional marginal suppliers at additional costs because your volume dropped. The average cost of cans will have increased and that's inflation too.
And as Milton Friedman wrote, "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output."
Of course, this is saying the same thing as the Law of Supply & Demand. More money being created wrt the goods and services it represents mean the money gets devalued.
Be careful with the Austrian School of Economics, because it masquerades as meaningful but under the hood is a religious faith as it rejects the need for measurement and the scientific method. Some ideas pass the logic filter for many people's lived experience without being accurate.
Hence, it is incorrect to say "Cost-push and demand-pull theories of inflation have been discredited" -- a more accurate assertion would be "the theories of cost-push and demand-pull inflation are argued against, unconvincingly to most but convincingly to me" since most people, including economists, do not adopt the tenets, rites, and axioms of the Austrian School. Note, your personal Austrian School-driven interpretation for what constituties inflation is likely why you are receiving pushback in this thread.
> We evaluate the merits of the "supply-side" view under which inflation results from sectoral shocks, and compare it with the "classical" view in which inflation results from aggregate factors such as variations in money growth. Using a panel VAR methodology applied to data for 13 GECD countries, we find support for a multi-shock view of inflation: supply-side shocks are statistically significant determinants of inflation, even after taking into account aggregate demand factors. While oil prices are the dominant supply-side influence, other measures such as the skewness of relative price changes are important as well. At short horizons, an innovation to skewness leads to an increase in inflation of 0.5 percentage points. As suggested by the classical view, money growth plays an increasingly important role as the time horizon lengthens.
The paper identifies energy (oil in 1995) as the main driver of supply-side inflation which seems reasonable to me because all of our economies use energy, and so changes in the supply of energy would cause shocks across the economy that would result in complex downstream ripple effects. We can watch this play out in Germany today, where they lack sufficient energy to fuel their economy due to the loss of Russian nat gas.
All that makes sense if you don’t believe you can increase supply to simply meet demand and experience growth. It feels like keeping interest rates low, allowing a transient period of inflation, then working on some offsetting deflation later would be a smarter play than making everyone more poor and unemployed than before to ensure they can’t afford to buy food, decreasing the cost of food.
Under the velocity of money theory (which most folks learn in AP Economics and intro college economics courses), an increase in dollars can indeed map to an increase in aggregate price level. Since the sovereign controls the money supply, then "printing money" is indeed considered a driver of inflation under that model.
Being a model, it doesn't capture all elements (especially dynamics and feedback cycles).
Further, a government printing of excess money is not the only way to increase the money supply in circulation. Large generalized increases in discretionary spending can do the same (another injection into the money supply) -- consider Japan.
For folks wanting an accessible intro, investopedia does a decent writeup: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/05/012005.asp
It was stolen by the upper classes and distributed to the stock markets, which exploded in value. There's numerous graphs outlining exploding stock markets, C-level payments or rents over the last decades, but wages have largely stagnated. And yes, a bit of the stock market increase is due to QE policy flooding the markets with money.
It doesn't make sense if you think of it in terms of the supply and demand of goods and services. If demand exceeds the capacity of society to produce and import, we get inflation and full employment. The US has had modest to high inflation and high employment for most of the last decade. So clearly there isn't an excess of goods and services, because if there is, sellers undercut each other for market share which keeps prices down.
The money going to the wealthy through capitalist exploitation is mostly removed from circulation, see the marginal propensity to consume. It ends up in the stock market, or bonds or such. Taking money out of circulation is deflationary and makes the rest of the money more valuable; fewer dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services means lower prices and more purchasing power.
Also, if the sum total of goods and services produced by an industry is not tightly coupled to hours worked, productivity will just fall with falling sales. So, if Google sells less of their GSuite subscriptions, but doesn’t do layoffs, productivity will fall. And this has very little to do with how hard individual Google employees work.
For example, if you fill a bucket with water, run around in a circle, and empty the bucket, you are surely working hard, but exhibit zero productivity.
Government bureaucrats are often an example of this. The "work" they do too often involves impeding productive private sector workers/organizations in some way.
Not only are these impeded private sector workers/organizations not doing their real work, but they're expending resources dealing with something that's usually quite irrelevant. That's on top of the tax burden they already face, which is being used to fund the bureaucrats that make these tax-payers less productive.
In the end, thanks to the "work" of government bureaucrats, less real wealth has been generated than otherwise would have been.
Let's talk about a normal year, for starters, to have a base to talk about. Suppose we have:
5% increase in nominal money supply
Which breaks down into 3 parts: population growth, productivity growth, and inflation.
So for example, in a normal year we might have:
1.5% increase in population
So that means we have 3.5% leftover that either has to be accounted for by productivity growth or inflation. In an average year we might have:
1.5% productivity growth
2% inflation
(There would actually be some small fractions here, but I'm simplifying the math because this is just a Hacker News comment. Feel free to work out the precise numbers yourself.)
Typically, we know the population growth fairly well, and we think we know the inflation number fairly well, so the estimate for productivity growth amounts to "Whatever we have left over after we subtract out the population growth and the inflation."
But what if we got inflation wrong? What if there were extraordinary events happening that make it more difficult to get an exact number on inflation? Then we would end up with a wrong productivity number.
If we overestimate inflation by 1% then we underestimate productivity by roughly 1% (qualifiers: not exactly, but good enough for this comment).
Remember, the inflation estimate is a weighted average of millions of products. A radical swing in one part of the index might have strange results, if the weighting is not exactly correct, or if the weighting relies too much on historical averages which are no longer relevant.
All of which is to say, we need to wait a year or two to know if this trend is real. It could just be a statistical illusion.
Edit: As I see I'm already being downvoted let me just say: you can't complain about inflation, and the unemployment that's resulting from it, while ignoring one of inflation's key drivers and pretending nothing can be done about it.
Of course prices have gone up, but some businesses are using this as an excuse to raise prices more than is needed to make up for their inputs, leading to record profits, which are undeniable. Fed chair Powell stated in a Senate hearing that some companies are doing this "because they can". This is a hotly debated (political) topic though because of course companies don't want to be seen as exacerbating inflation, but there's plenty read if you search around.
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/3715725-rising-profits-ar....
Here is the most unlikely citation you'll ever see me post on Hacker News. On FOX News no less, bizarrely hosting an op-ed by Bernie Sanders! But this is the key graf:
> According to a recent study, nearly 54% of the rise in inflation is directly attributable to the astronomical increase in corporate profit margins. In America today, while the working class struggles to put food on the table, fill up their gas tanks and heat their homes, corporate profits are at a 70-year-high.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/our-economic-crisis-isnt-inf...
The next several paragraphs are then specific examples: oil industry, airlines, agribusiness, with examples of their profit margins increasing significantly.
now, "a recent study", blah blah where are the numbers etc., sure. However, that's the argument, take it or leave it. Bernie tends to be pretty accurate when he cites stats.
In other words, he likely wants to spend less time "preaching to the choir".
People complain that "both parties are the same". This is mostly overstated, but it is very true when it comes to neo-liberalism and pro-captial. I think Bernie is trying to reach out to the swing voters who are sick of that.
But I am in complete agreement with you on the point you made. Why are we treating profits as untouchable? If labor and cost of goods go up, maybe profits should go down before passing the cost to consumers? I suspect the answer is not very pleasing for many people.
First of all, the Fed doesn't have the power to implement price controls or levy taxes. Also, why do you think they don't want you to know about them? Janet Yellen, our last Fed Chair, is pushing towards higher taxes, she's part of the administration pushing for a windfall tax.
Nixon froze wages along with prices, so it's ironic that you're using him a positive example.
That the government is allowed to use.
Cost of living in cities is sky high, rent and property prices are a huge part of that. The solution, rezone and build crap tons of housing, is politically untenable due to a vocal minority.
Increasing corporate taxes, or just taxes in general on the upper brackets, another lever that isn't available in the current political climate.
I have to pay more to have an office, never see anyone from my team except for a few off sites a year and a sync communication is way lossier than in person.
I miss my commute, 30 minutes each way on a train — it was my reading time. Now I don’t read, work or something else fills the slot.
The commute also provided a hard boundary, both mentally and physically at the end of the day from carrying work home with me.
I prefer that the job enforce all of these boundaries and not that I have to reimplement what I had gotten for free this time with my own mental effort to make these new boundaries.
Personally, these days at the age of 42, I prefer working remote.
Of course you do. You have the space to accommodate it and have yet to see the larger impact this “everybody works at home” will have.
Work is work. That’s why you get paid for it. You get paid because otherwise nobody would do it…
Sure I could move to some huge house with a fancy office but that just seems wrong to me. Density is the only way only of sprawl and inefficient resource use. But density makes it kinda hard to have a two bedroom, one office apartment. It also becomes rather depressing.
I dunno man, the chips are gonna fall on the table sooner or later. Lots of people working in the tech industry completely lost their mind over Covid and I suspect there is a lot of healing that people need to process. I don’t think people are working with their whole brain yet…
Near the end of a year of forced WFH, I was pretty close to zero productive hours per day. I hated it. I would wake up crying. If having a few unproductive hours of chat per day with coworkers who also want to be in the office is what keeps me sane and working, then so be it. My employer seems fine with it.
(Thanks for reading this comment. This is a reminder that this comment was from my point of view and was about me. You may feel differently than I do! That's OK.)
The fact my post would get a response like this really makes skeptical of this whole WFH trend. Normal people don't write stuff like you did. What you wrote is so dismissive of others feelings and thoughts... it's just wildly inappropriate. It's like somebody who is trying to force an agenda.
It feels quite a lot like the kind of responses somebody might get when they pointed out issues with societies covid mitigations. You'd get the same dismissive, nasty tone.
Live and let live, eh? This shit is just bizarre.
This argument is absolutely insane to me. You weren't paid for your commuting time before - if work now fills that slot it's because you're choosing to work earlier/more.
Like the parent, I also really like my commute. It's 40 minutes, each way, on the bus. I also use it to read. There's a library right next to my office! I'm going there this afternoon before I grab the bus. It's great.
When I was forced to work from home in 2020, the commute was actually one of the things I missed the most. You're correct that I could have just spent 40 minutes reading each day at home. But I didn't! I looked at my phone or cleaned the house or started work early or something. Having the forced structure is what works for me, to enforce different "parts" of my day. I catch the bus at 7 AM. I read for the 40 minute ride. I get to work around 8. I catch the bus home at 4 PM. I'm home around 5. It works for me.
Working from home didn't, I felt lost and bored and frustrated and actually had some breakdowns near the end of it and ended up going back to the office before I was vaccinated, which was kind of scary but better than waking up crying. I don't know why that's the way I am, but it is.
(Thanks for reading this comment. This is a reminder that this comment was from my point of view and was about me. You may feel differently than I do! That's OK.)
I don't see anyone in this thread doing otherwise.
Your comparison to "crowded stressful" cities is also kind of amusing. There is nothing inherent to cities that requires they feel stressful or over crowded. No more than it would be valid for me to say "barren and empty towns."
And remote work is a bit of a right, already. If you are truly as productive as you think you are, it will be somewhat easy to convince an employer to take that offer.
My main qualm in this is I have seen countless times folks have "obvious and well reasoned arguments" on why the companies that are succeeding are doing things wrong. I am not so naive as to fully expect a superior work environment would naturally rise to success, but I do question why successful remote jobs are typically not the norm, if that is such a better way.
Having said that, most arguments against remote work on hn are usually wrong solutions to legitimate problems.
These answers are usually centred around people’s need to socialise, housing issues, communication issues and supervision. All of these have alternative solutions that the onsite crowd doesn't want to explore.
But even so, everyone is entitled to an opinion. We should also be entitled to a preference. But the onsite crowd usually wants everyone else to be onsite (otherwise whom are they going to socialise with or who are they going to sit with in front of a whiteboard?). Basically they want to remote crowd to fill in their voids and gaps.
I have no issue with people wanting to be on site. I want their wish be granted. But they should have no right in dictating where and how i should do my work.
Also a company is successful due to various factors none of which seem to be working onsite or remote for that matter. Just because we do things a certain way it doesnt mean thats the right way or the only way. Nor does it mean something is not the norm due to not being equally good or better. Plenty of things we do as a society can be improved, and one of them is that due to modern technologies we can give people the option to chose where to work from. Now it can become the norm due to a convergence of multiple factors.
You have the claim that remote work is more productive and happier. You more than heavily imply that this is a universal truth for everyone. What is your actual evidence to that claim? I can easily accept "I like remote work more." I have a hard time thinking that generalizes in any meaningful way.
Note that I don't know that there is a solid claim that "getting people together" is amazing. It does at least have some appeal to the social of the working side. If folks are building things together, it is not hard to see there may be advantage to them being there together to do so.
Easier to see with some jobs. For easy example, why insist that all members of a sports team relocate to the home town for that team? At face value, you could "trust" them to just all show up on gameday ready for the game. I don't think anyone would argue for that, though.
For many, with WFH there are no after work hours. Work-Life Balance is a lie, it’s Work-Life Integration.
[1] me: So it's not COVID and not the flu?
doc: Yeah, there's something going around.
me: So I just have "something".
doc: Yeah.
Back in the bad old days in 2019 this was the normal diagnosis you'd get for almost any respiratory virus. They'd tell you "it's viral and there really isn't much you can do besides rest it out".
What changed is we now have cheap "accurate" tests for exactly one specific flavor of virus that people are encouraged to take any time they get even an incredibly minor illness (or sometimes even no symptoms at all!)
Makes me wonder what would happen if you went to a doctors office and they'd test you for every single virus known to man. Lord knows the things you'd probably test positive for. People would never leave the house again!
IDK. In my job, just fixing an issue isn't enough. I want to know what exactly happened to cause the issue, why it happened, and what I can do to prevent similar issues in the future. I want to know how pervasive the issue is, if it's just for some users or all users, if it's getting better or worse.
Seems like too much of how doctors are trained is "you're not paid to look any deeper than the bandaid."
Looking at data I found here https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity it does not look like there has been a real drop at all, just a jump for the past few years (why is this? initial WFH improvements during the pandemic?) that has dropped back to the same gradual historical increase. I think I'd like to see more analysis to be sure this is or isn't a real trend but I wouldn't worry quite yet.
"made me laugh until I cried. Then I put my face in my hands and screamed a little bit."
"we cannot agree that trying to hang the vice president is a bad thing, I am very, very tired of screaming"
"People are freaking tired, man"
"some of us could make banana bread, but medical and other frontline workers most certainly could not"
This is some upper-class woman who has a comfortable life and needs to invent problems to make herself feel alive. The entire article is basically composed of disjointed midwit bromides like the ones I've quoted above.
Well, that is simply no longer possible on a single income, even a low six-figure one. To get the rewards I've busted my ass for thus far I have to look beyond my job. So unless economic circumstances change, said job is a 40 hour chore to keep the ship afloat while I spin up additional revenue streams. Outside of legitimate customer emergencies it will get all the commitment that my laundry gets (and my laundry is nicely folded). Any request for more better help me buy a house in a good school district or pay for my kids' college. I want nothing more than what my immediate Gen-X and Boomer co-workers have had for decades, and I'm sure as hell not going to lower my family's standard of living just to increase some middle manager's metrics.
> What we don’t need is a bunch of people wondering why we’re being less productive in the workplace as if the answer weren’t right in front of them.
Amen to both statements. We don’t need people questioning why isn’t the workforce being more productive - “why are they quiet quitting?” Because you worked your employees to the bone. And you still want more.
People are real - they have families. They need to live for something more fulfilling than a job that is always asking for more. We have been systemically deprived of our rights (no more unions, international employees being exploited with no real recourse, medical benefits depending on our jobs).
This is a modern form of exploitation of people by companies. Top brass makes disproportionate wealth. Their perks go up every year. Minimum wage gets a paltry increase. Or worse - stays flat.
Those in (or seeking) power want us to keep fighting over politics, so we don’t have the time to think for ourselves. No more.
Speak up everyone. For yourselves, your friends, your colleagues. Talk about how frustrated you are because your work doesn’t get that your child is sick and needs your attention and love at home. Or that you had a rough breakup. Or that you want to spend your 5 o’clock drinking with buddies, instead of attending a work meeting.
My case may be limited to a small group but I'm sure I’m not alone here. Productivity wasn't an issue working from home, I was designing electronics to completely revamp our product range in work. While everything up until this was focused on backwards compatibility, this was a clean slate project and give us chance to explore new tech.
Sue to the nature of our systems, there's many PCBs involved but the designs were going well and even had a few prototype boards built just before the Electronics shortages hit.
For most of the new designs we used the STM32 range as there were a lot available and plenty of options available. They seemed amongst the early ones that went out of stock. After that even just basic components just seemed to have dried up.
For almost 2 years now, most of my time has been spent keeping existing systems up and running, finding alternative parts or where that's not possible, redesigning boards just to keep production running. Some of these changes have been minor but had to change a Microcontroller on a couple of boards which also requires re-writing firmware for those boards.
It’s been a demoralising couple of years and while there's a thought that things should get better, there's no end in sight yet. When you get to the point that you're no longer enjoying the work, that's when productivity falls.
I am an armchair layman with no empirical data, but I think there are two truths.
For one, western capitalist societies are in a race to the bottom. Many “leaders”, out of ignorance or being outright sociopaths, care about nothing else except endless, unsustainable growth and optimizing financial metrics.
And second, the Information Age worker is realizing that working hard is not enough, getting a degree is not enough, that their labor is being exploited to make someone else rich, while workers can hardly afford housing. White collar? Doesn’t matter either. The “game” has changed.
And I think for the longest time, many were convinced that this exploitation was a thing of the past, and this generation has it far better. Suddenly, it’s as if people are realizing 1+1 isn’t 2 unless you’re born rich, incredibly lucky, etc., which for most people is a tough pill to slow.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how this might be solved - getting rid of complex financial instruments and derivatives, making employee ownership mandatory or at least highly incentivized, banning digital advertising... I have to stop myself because of course none of it can happen; the people in power would never allow a change which dilutes their advantage. So, instead of trying to better my situation, I am stuck looking for ways to decouple myself from the world of work as much as possible. Quiet quitting and early retirement is about the best I can hope for right now.
Wages in real terms have been stagnant since the early-mid 70s. We probably, generally, need to pay workers more.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/banks-in-germany-tell-customers...
> 34-year-old said, adding that he plans to use the money to buy a house before the birth of his second child this year
Anecdotally as a manager who just started a role at a new company managing 2 teams whose members are mostly remote to different degrees, it’s been very difficult to get a sense of the teams capabilities, mood and load vs the book of work. It’s easy to ask questions and I want to keep everyone engaged, but I also don’t want to micromanage or give the impression of big brother looking over their shoulders.
That doesn't necessarily need to be related to worker efficiency at all? If we are measuring the output in monetary terms then inflation will bring it down?
Just as we started to be able to cautiously gather and go out and do things, fuel prices skyrocketed and inflation started ramping up. We all just need a proper vacation.
Since then, I realize working long hours; countless hours wasted at night solving and fixing issues isn’t worth the time on earth.
Working hard and looking like a 40 year old man when I was 24 years old. I started to see gray hair show.( I’m not exaggerating, I looked like shit) 3 years ago, gray hair was showing.
Not worth it being called “ the main man”
Not worth it.
The second group (more disconnected) is much happier on average than the first group (chronically online). The most chronically online people I know have gone through cycles of being convinced that Trump was going to cause nuclear armageddon to believing that COVID was going to kill or debilitate everyone they know, to thinking that economic collapse is imminent and nuclear war is inevitable, and so on and so on. It never ends, and as soon as one crisis fizzles out they're on to the next one within weeks.
The author of this article clearly fits that description. Here is her description of the pandemic:
> During the early days of the pandemic, when we were all locked down and obsessively monitoring our sense of smell, there was nothing else to do but worry and work. Well, some of us could make banana bread, but medical and other frontline workers most certainly could not. And with so many businesses shutting down, the fear of being fired was real. Those who did not lose their jobs worked like hell to keep them; those who lost their jobs and then managed to find new ones did exactly the same thing.
Anyone paying attention to the job market knows that the COVID closure fears were real, but short-lived. The economy immediately swung in the opposite direction, with hiring sprees everywhere and wages being driven up spectacularly in response to the increased demand. Characterizing that period as "everyone being afraid of losing their jobs" can only be done if you view everything through a heavy filter of cynicism. It's like the positives disappear from memory and only the most negative things can persist.
That said, this is a real problem. People like to blame Facebook or specific social medias, but honestly websites like Reddit or smaller communities like HN are some of the most persistent in spreading this type of world-is-collapsing narrative. It drains people.
The worst pandemic we have recorded, the Black Plague, only killed between 30 - 60% of the population. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic the death rate was about 4%, and even in Italy where the medical system collapsed it was only 15%. Plus it was known early on that the mortality rate for under 40--people who will go on to reproduce--was very low. These figures are not even close to extinction level. Even the plague wasn't close to that level. So I strongly agree that fears of extinction are "unbelievable hyperbole". Was Covid serious? Yes. Could many people have died? Yes. A serious tragedy? Could have been (although I think the bigger problem, in retrospect, was shutting down the economy/society). Possibility of extinction? Not in the cards.
When you take away someone's everyday routine, for many, this takes away their meaning.
existential crises are not only about existence in physical form, but the ego existence as well.
You wold have read hundreds of articles about it during covid and not even remembered:
https://uthealtheasttexasdoctors.com/news/finding-meaning-an...
https://news.olemiss.edu/finding-meaning-and-resilience-six-...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.6417...).
Honestly, all of the 'productivity is down' and 'quiet quitting' PR spin articles from everyone from Fox to CNN to NPR have made me realize that either the people who have wealth and control media are completely disconnected from my reality, or, are absolute sociopaths.
Legitimately, everyone in my life is exhausted. They're exhausted by covid, inflation, war, politics, violence, whatever it is. They're exhausted. It's all too much, and it's all running together.
I believe we are on the edge of a massive social upheaval. No idea what will happen or what will set it off, but I do believe that.
This is essentially the "no shit" answer from the author. I would be lying if I said it wasn't also my initial thought to the productivity news when I read the headline recently.
Why not both?
This is a response to an article in the Washington Post (that was discussed earlier here): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33405389
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. It's clear what's going on here. The corporate backed media is trying to convince Americans that their compatriots are lazy, quelling support for expanded workers' rights/compensation. That this is happening so close to an election may not be a coincidence. In my neck of the woods, I see ads in support of candidates who label their opponents' supporters as lazy & unwilling to work.
The alternate, potentially more honest, statement should be that productivity hasn't increased at the same rate as it did in the past. I'm not the only employee who has realized that working harder year after year isn't physically or psychologically sustainable, and is rarely (if ever) rewarded.
Someone is angry we're not working hard enough.
The more honest statement is that productivity always grows going into a recession and falls going out of one. This is a known pattern[1] emerging from the marginal response of firms: the least productive workers, on a profit per hour basis, are laid off first. And the last to be rehired. So in a recession, average productivity goes up alongside unemployment. And as hiring ramps up out of a recession, the opposite happens.
Unfortunately, the COVID recession was partially imposed on the economy, and so whatever natural cadence the business cycle possesses is overlapping with the next recession. So in a few months we'll likely see stories about productivity increasing again.
edit: I just want to make a point that low productivity doesn't mean bad. Bad productivity is _negative_. Low productivity is just much closer to the "hurdle rate" that capitalists use to determine whether to fund projects, making the jobs riskier than the typical 30% margin SaaS products the HN crowd is most familiar with.
[1]: http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/research/e... (the first citation i could find, not nessecarily the best)
As the countless number of stores closed entirely or with massively reduced opening hours shows, societies that over-pay for bullshit jobs (=investment bankers, C-level executives, ...) and under-pay workers who do actual work in gruesome conditions don't do well either once workers realize the power is with them.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo both believed in the labor theory of value.
Wrong, value is created subjectively, by other people desiring the products of that labor. If nobody wants what the laborers created, then their labor had no value.
Roll a rock up and down a hill all day. You'll work hard as hell but you'll create no value. Anybody who denies the subjective theory of value is out to lunch.
Sit and stare at a rock and you have created no new value.
Labor can also destroy value, for example when a building is destroyed in a riot, or when a rock is pushed up a hill to a location that makes it less valuable.
but most raw material requires applied labor to become valuable: at the very least transportation to them
Everybody makes misteaks.
productivity growth is always rewarded, it leads to more goods at lower prices across the economy, so everybody's standard of living goes up. This is a very real effect; consider how small percentages of inflation cause pain throughout the economy, the same pain is produced through productivity drops.
Which is an insane amount of time and probably does not actually increase productivity. The math does not check out as you claimed though.
I say this while sipping my morning coffee, browsing HN and waiting for an amount of computation to finish on a single machine that required either a supercomputer or multi-million dollar cluster 20 years ago.
Whether I knock it out of the park, or slack off, I get pretty much the same outcome. Loyalty is not rewarded - see the recent layoffs.
Now, I’m not complaining, I just think maybe more people are waking up to the drawbacks of being an employee.
All my extra energy is now focused toward side businesses - as those start paying off, my contribution to GDP is likely to go way up.
Some kid in Portugal was chatting with me about the US. He said never he'd never want to come here, to many guns, and we work way to much. Yeah we work our selves to death, in our suburban covered hell.
At least everyone I know is sick of work, corporate bull shit, sick of not getting ahead ever, and grinding away on meaningless tasks, we're all burned out.
I'd rather be around 7 people concealed-carrying at a business, than at a "gun-free" business.
The US has far more guns and far more gun violence than anywhere else in the developed world, by huge margins.
Personal ownership of guns does not make individuals safer. Indeed, it's quite the opposite when you look at the data.
Your anecdote is not data.
My state doesn't even require permits to do so. Can't recall the last mass shooting that happened in this state.
My boss is chill with me carrying at work. A couple coworkers know that I carry at work. The police are chill when I'm pulled over, and I announce that I am carrying.
There's a culture issue. Guns aren't leaving. Banning them leaves us more vulnerable. Citizens commonly carried firearms around the world until the rise of fascism. Now the norm is disarming the populous. I'm more scared of my government knowing that the citizenry they govern have no means of retaliation, than I am of the very very miniscule chance that I'll have to stop a mass shooter.
It's pretty logical that less guns = less gun violence.
You will never be allowed to have weaponry that can seriously challenge the US military in any meaningful way, that govt resistance part is a pipe dream.
The government being too powerful doesn't mean "well it's over, let's just make them more powerful."
Y'all take an existing problem and jump in the totally wrong direction with solutions.
Just a guess.
The problem is sociopaths that want attention. Gun safety doesn't fix that. Getting gunned down before they can carry out their sick acts, and not being talked about on corporate media, are what's needed.
That's not true of a gun violence problem.
American gun culture scares even a majority of Americans themselves.
Incidentally we just concluded yet another trial determining the fate of yet another teenage shooter who committed yet another mass murder in yet another high school. Do we need to continue this debate?
Are you speaking in terms of liberal city-dwellers, or all areas of America?
We're up to half of the country adopting permitless concealed-carry, with others in the process. Doesn't sound like the majority of the country to me.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-a...
48% of americans think gun violence is a “very big problem”, 24% “moderate problem”, and 22% “small problem”.
6% think it’s “not a problem at all”.
53% favor stricter gun laws.
Are we mixing and matching things just to prove a point? Because the only place where a gun really makes sense is at a war or at a place of extreme crime. Not while driving a car and not while reading a newspaper.
Not so fast. Your gun (and its variants) are designed to cause extinction. Cars aren't.
And listen up son. If you cannot distinguish between the primary use of things at a given time, you have big problems in life. I would recommend going back to high school to learn what "Critical thinking is, as they say, critical" means.
The other aspect is that if you make statements about a country that are both general and pejorative ("The US is a sick country"), that's nationalistic flamebait.
That kind of rhetoric isn't going to reduce political division. The opposite, in fact.