Productivity down as Remote Work up? | Hacker News Reader

Productivity down as Remote Work up?

arnoldkling.substack.com

30 pointspaulpauper9 comments

I am curios why we are still insisting on more productivity for everything.

Isn't productivity loosing value with increasing number of people? All the talk about UBI could be foregone if we could make do with less productivity and employ more people.

Of course I am imagining something "unacceptable".

> If you calculate GDP per worker, and call that productivity, then productivity is declining.

"Productivity" is output (generally economic) per operation. For workers, it's typically economic value (to the employer) of an hour's or day's labor. For machinery it's typically economic value of operating it for a period.

GDP per worker doesn't make sense and is not what anybody uses.

BTW, WFH can increase productivity from the worker's PoV since they no longer have to divide their salary (the economic value of their work) by the commute time, just the time when they are working. So same numerator, smaller denominator.

GDP was never really an accurate calculation and interest rates greatly affect whatever the natural baseline is at any time. Calling productivity down with greater Remote Work is a red herring because there's less overall economic output because the cost of money has risen so steeply and will continue to do so at least two more times. Unfortunately, they've printed about as much as they've offset in interest rates so it looks more like its engineered to kill off any normal to mid-size business. The only people getting the easy money are the people on the gravy train.

> GDP was never really an accurate calculation and interest rates greatly affect whatever the natural baseline is at any time.

GDP (GNP back then) was just a simple, interim suggestion of Simon Kuznets' while walking with FDR and talking about the depression back in the early 1930s. It wasn't meant to be an authoritative or be-all-and-end-all for the state of the economy.

Like the Charles Dow's indexes, GNP was something that could relatively easily be calculated (Dow could do it with a pencil and paper; GNP needed the simple statistical bureaucracy of the time to collect the raw data). Also like the Dow, once reported you didn't want to stop because it was the longest time series data available. Also like the Dow it was readjusted via judgement from time to time.

I want us to distinguish between planning (where the office may or may not be better than writing) and implementing (where a noisy open plan office is definitely worse). The latter should be the majority of our work, unless we’re constantly making last-minute design changes.

I wonder how many of these articles are paid for or somehow influenced by those with commercial real estate holdings.

If remote work entails productivity benefits then why weren't they noticed during the pandemic? Virtually all companies wanted their employees back in the office. That suggests that the work from home experiment failed.

Betteridge's law strikes again.

TIL a new law.

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