Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjbwork | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. It's like our entire society has been turned into a Goodhart's Law based simulacrum of a productive society.

I mean, here it's late morning and I'm commenting on hacker news. And getting paid for it.

Workers are many times more efficient than they were in the 50s or 70s or 80s or 90s. Where are our extra vacation days? Why does the worker have to make up for the efficiency with more work while other people take the gains?

Do you seriously think that the purpose of life is to work all the time most efficiently? Enjoy your lazy job and bask in the ability for human society to be productive without everyone breaking their backs all the time.

focusing on efficiency is very depressing. Machines seek efficiency. Process can be efficient. Assembly lines are efficient. It's all about optimization and quickly focuses on trimming "waste" and packing as much as possible into the smallest space. It removes all that's amazing about human life.

I much prefer a focus on effectiveness (or impact or outcomes, or alternatives). It plays to human strengths, is far less prescriptive and is way more fun!

Some of the most effective actions are incredibly inefficient; sometimes inefficiency is a feature. I received a letter mail thank-you card from our CEO a few years ago. The card has an approx. value of zero dollars, but I know it took the CEO 5-10 mins to write a personal note and sign it, and that she did this dozens of times. The signal here is incredibly valuable! If she used a signing machine, or AI to record a deep fake message I would know or quickly learn, and the value would go negative - all for the sake of efficiency.

Kropotkin wondered the same in the 1880s [0]

[0]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/the-conque...

I think this is a big part of it. Workers would feel a lot more motivated to do more than just perform if they were given what they know they’re owed for their contribution.

Europe stole them.

Faced with increasing efficiency, Europe by and large appears to have chosen to work less and let expensive things remain expensive. The US, by contrast, now has ridiculously cheap consumer goods, and works all the time.

crazy that this is true and GDP just keeps increasing anyway

Of course GDP increases when the money supply does. It’s like people being incensed at “record corporate profits” amidst inflation - profits will always be record (give or take) because remaining the same is losing money relative to the free money being minted each day, etc. For whatever reason, people naively buy into GDP as a valuable metric, even knowing well that there would be something extremely mysterious going on if that number somehow shrank while the real value of the medium exchange also shrank

Since when did increasing money supply increase GDP? Why didn't that work for Zimbabwe?

this is not how GDP works

Reply on news.ycombinator.com