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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying it is totally untrue, but this is the same generic, hedged statement that every business and political leader has been repeating for a couple years now. Unless there's anything new or noteworthy added (and looking at the article there isn't) what is really worth discussing?

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They linked to the economic report article:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-third-quarter-productivi...

Productivity up 5%.

Productivity/dollar up 3% Q2 and 2% Q3 even as labor costs up 1%.

Another source that has been finding labor productivity increases in national-level data, since 2024 now:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-gen...

> ... on average, industries with 1 percentage point higher time savings experienced 2.7 percentage points higher productivity growth relative to their prepandemic trend. We stress that this correlation cannot be interpreted as causal, and that labor productivity is determined by many factors. However, the current results are suggestive that generative AI may already be noticeably affecting industry-level productivity.

This is not due to AI. The industries with the most impact on labor productivity are retail, wholesale trade, and manufacturing, all of which aren’t really benefiting much from AI.

The tech sector employs about 2% of the labor force. Even if AI was dramatically increasing labor productivity in the tech industry, it would have a negligible effect on these statistics.

What's new is who is saying it, i.e. people with better understanding of the economy than you or I.

People in much more important and powerful positions than her (presidents, CEOs of multi-trillion dollars companies, top economists, heck Jerome Powell himself) have been saying this exact thing in countless interviews and business forums. She is hardly the first.

> people with better understanding of the economy

> People in much more important and powerful positions than her

I said "understanding," you said "power." There's a difference: presidents and CEOs say lots of dumb stuff.

This is an ignorant statement cloaked as cynicism. Its purpose is to give permission to check out on politics.

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