After 150 Years, the American Productivity Miracle Is 'Over' (qz.com) 431
An anonymous reader shares an article on Quartz: Economist Robert Gordon has spent his career studying what makes the US labor force one of the world's most productive. And he has some bad news. American workers still produce some of most economic activity per hour of any economy in the world. But the near-miraculous productivity growth that essentially transformed the US into one of the world's most affluent societies is permanently in the country's rearview mirror. In his new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the Northwestern University professor lays out the case that the productivity miracle underlying the American way of life was largely a one-time deal. It was driven by a flurry of technologies -- electric lights, telephones, automobiles, indoor plumbing -- that fundamentally transformed millions of American lives within a matter of decades. By comparison, Gordon argues, today's technological advancements -- Uber, Facebook, Amazon.com -- will touch the productivity of the American economy lightly -- if at all. And a combination of demographic factors, such as the aging of the US population, and sociological problems such as growing inequality and educational performance that's worsened in comparison to many other rich nations, will stymie economic growth for the foreseeable future.For those not following Gordon's work, he has been expressing these views for quite some time now. Here's
his TED talk from 2013 It shouldn't come as a surprise that many strongly disagree with Gordon's views. Kevin Kelly wrote in 2013: I think Robert Gordon is wrong about his conclusion: According to Gordon growth has stalled in the internet age. This question was first asked by Robert Solow in 1987 and Gordon's answer is that there are 6 'headwinds' six negative, or contrary forces which deduct growth from the growth due to technology in the US (Gordon reiterates he is only speaking of the US). The six 'headwinds' slowing down growth are the aging of the US population, stagnant levels of education, rising inequality, outsourcing and globalization, environmental constraints, and household and government debt. I agree with Gordon about these headwinds, particularly the first one, which he also sees as the most important. Where Gordon is wrong is his misunderstanding and underestimating of the power of technological growth before it meets these headwinds. First, as mentioned above, he underestimates the value of the innovations that the internet has brought us. They seem trivial compared to running water and electric lights, but in fact, as billions around the world show us, they are just as valuable. [...] So the 3rd Industrial Revolution is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything. And in that regime we are just at the beginning of the beginning. We have only begun to connect everything to everything and to make little network minds everywhere. It may take another 80 years for the full effect of this revolution to be revealed. In the year 2095 when economic grad students are asked to review this paper of Robert Gordon and write about why he was wrong back in 2012, they will say things like "Gordon missed the impact from the real inventions of this revolution: big data, ubiquitous mobile, quantified self, cheap AI, and personal work robots. All of these were far more consequential than stand alone computation, and yet all of them were embryonic and visible when he wrote his paper. He was looking backwards instead of forward." You might also find Freakonomics' Stephen J. Dubner views on this interesting.
False premise (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:False premise (Score:5, Funny)
Re:False premise (Score:5, Interesting)
Uber: order an illegal taxi.. but online.
Facebook: Gossip circle... but online.
Amazon: going to a warehouse... but online.
None of these are innovations, apart from Amazon, none of them are even successful. This is why American innovation is failing, you cant just add "but online" to something that already exists and call it new. Uber and Facebook are feats of marketing over technology and hard work and if you ask me, that is exactly the problem.
First off, dont get me wrong, the US still produces a lot of innovative products, just not from people you normally think (Apple, Uber, Facebook, none of them innovative, yes fanbois, its true and you know it so bite me). Think of things like VMWare NSX, the thing is, things like that are built with global talent. That has really been the only thing keeping the US ahead of the game, the fact that you used to be able to attract the best scientific and engineering talent... So what happened.
Well I said commonly cited "innovations" are nothing but marketing circuses and there in lies the problem. Being seen as an innovation is more important to a modern American company than actually being innovative. Science and engineering jobs are not respected, they're seen as cost centres, necessary evils and punished when engineering cannot produce what marketing has promised. As such, STEM jobs are now low paying and have appalling conditions. Long hours and low pay in lay terms, why would anyone want to go to the US for that, you can have shit wages in your own country and often better conditions than the US (20-28 paid holidays a year sound nice)?
Add to this, the patent and copyright minefield that has been created. The US became big by deliberately ignoring the patents of other nations, now seeks to viciously defend its own. Property that has no tangible value is defended more vigorously than people who can actually develop and build new technologies.
Whilst engineers have always been happy to work long hours for their craft, they've traditionally been rewarded for it, this is the kind of thing that made NASA, Boeing and IBM giants. Now the marketers are more important and get the big wages, the lawyers, instead of being told to solve problems for the engineers are now forcing engineers to solve problems for them. Laws have become anti-innovation and anti-technology. Appearance is now more important than reality. Am I the only one who sees the problem with this?
Re:False premise (Score:4, Interesting)
Science and engineering jobs are not respected, they're seen as cost centres, necessary evils and punished when engineering cannot produce what marketing has promised. As such, STEM jobs are now low paying and have appalling conditions.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
You named the root of one of the problems that I have personally seen working in IT, and lead to my decision to get out.
I remember being a direct report to a vice president of the company and had been tasked with maintaining a system that had been installed in a bank. I myself had more than 5 years working in both the tech support environment and tech support in the financial services environment and a failure of one of our installed systems had occurred and I was blamed because I had not, in the failure situation, pulled out my own credit card, bought the replacement part on the spot and repaired the system to meet our service level agreement. (Shit rolls downhill) The service level agreement, along with the fact of the choice of buying low quality hardware and not testing before the install feeds into the problem you point out that created a perfect storm of circumstance that lead to our losing the customer.
What should have happened. The company manager who had purchased the hardware and installed it should have tested it. (this was not me who did the install, I was just called in to repair it.) Promises were made by salesmen based on an assumption that I had a much higher income than I did, sure if I had $900 to $1800 of disposable income, I would have used my own money, but the point is that the promise should not have been made or hinged on my using my own income to retain the customer. The blaming me for the loss of the customer was out of line, and yes I argued this with the vice president and kept my job. (Though the VP always was the type that acted like his actions did not have consequences and that he was always the smartest person in the room, despite the fact he had no college education or technical experience.) This problem would have been most directly solved by under promising and over delivering. This did not happen because of problems that were out of my sphere of influence to correct, yet I had that bad mark on my record with the company.. IN the future I plan to save up some money to spend in situations like this and then charge them hefty interest when they pull crap like this.. so I get praise for saving the day and make a monetary profit when they have poor planning like this.
Education is the problem, the fact that the leaders are marketing people who think that because they make more money that makes them IT experts. This kind of management fail is what caused the Challenger disaster.. when the beancounters got too big for their britches and started making technical decisions.
Re:False premise (Score:4)
Your point can be boiled down to two things: engineers don't appreciate sales/marketing, and management doesn't anticipate the risks that are identified for them by engineers turning into real problems.
These failures rest on the engineers.
Yes, I am an engineer. I am also a manager and a piss-poor salesman. (Also a janitor and adult-daycare specialist.)
As an engineer, I must understand the challenges faced in the sales process. Namely, people often ask for things they can't have or that won't work. If that issue is identified in the pre-sales process, you won't get the work, but someone else will. When it is identified after thorough analysis then there is a different level of consideration, and a good engineer works within the process.
My favorite CxO that I have worked with over the years is a true genius. When I am asked to explain things to him, he insists that I keep it at a third grade level in my use of terms, process, and language. After I have presented, he proceeds to ask questions, generally using correct technical terms rather than whatever "third grade" terms I used, showing real insight into the issues, and more importantly into the business impact of the issues.
The challenge often comes down to making sure that the nuanced specificity of an engineer's response does not cloud the bigger issues. As an engineer I know there are very few black and white questions, but "it depends" is a non-productive answer.
Re:False premise (Score:4, Insightful)
If you read more carefully, at least one promise made by sales/marketing was borderline illegal. That second thing, managers not recognizing that risks identified by engineers may actually become problems is firmly a management problem. The engineer's job is to identify the risks. It is management's job to balance risk and reward on the business side. Bad managers take credit for the rewards and blame the risks on the engineers.
Your favorite CxO is a great counter example. He took ownership of the communications process and learned enough to make that communication effective. That's what management is supposed to do.
So tell me, how many servers does it take?
Guess what, if you attempt to answer that question honestly, you will use a construct that reads like "it depends" because it really DOES depend on what I want those servers to do.
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The US became big by deliberately ignoring the patents of other nations
Just wanted to take a second to point out this is entirely wrong. Patents protect a national market: there is no "ignoring" or even "enforcing" another country's patent under any nation's law. To the extent that there are any exceptions to that statement (such as the European Patent Convention) there are treaties and specific national implementation legislation that the country has explicitly agreed to and passed, making such
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Absolutely. It's amazing the amount of utter tripe that gets posted to /. If you can't distinguish between "a technology" and "an application," you deserve to be consigned to the loony-bin. Whoever "manishs" is, he/she should be ashamed of owning this piece of nonsense.
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Facebook makes mass communication in your social circle more rapid. It reduces the amount of time required to share social ideas (e.g. pictures) and to make social plans. That's technology.
The application of technology *is* technology. So are a lot of things nobody thinks about. In education, I often talk about mnemonics, mental mathematics, and theories such as deliberate practice; these things build on more basic structures of psychology applied to education ("educational psychology"), and can give
Re:False premise (Score:4, Insightful)
Productivity is work done per person. The virtual computer world has skyrocketted productivity as you can create much more complicated things (software) and mass produce them (copy) and distribute them (download) almost for free.
This is a gigantic, quantum leap of productivity. They measure it wrong.
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As someone who spent 2 hours today staring at a windows update I disagree with you and with the premise.
The quantum leap has already happened which is exactly what the summary is saying. We've reached a peak productivity and given my effort today technology wise peak productivity was yesterday. Today was me falling asleep at my desk.
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Amazon is a technological advancement (for economic purposes) if technology is applied in a way that makes the system more efficient. Amazon's logistical system is actually extremely impressive.
Facebook.....is crap.
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Uber is a technological advancement ( for economic purposes )
If you're going to comment on a story about economics, and tell economists they are wrong, at least learn how economists define the words they use. Otherwise you are attacking a strawman.
Amazon and "productivity" (Score:4)
I would disagree, at least in the case of Amazon. They've revolutionized Logistics and Distribution, especially in concert with the shipping partners like UPS, FedEx, and DHL.
Better logistics and distribution adds to productivity.
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but none of that manifests itself in making the work force at large more productive.
Sure it does.
Firms A and B exist in a market for X and Firm C comes around with some new innovation on how to service market X. Firm B adapts to to the competition and continues to service a segment of market X. Firm A does not adapt and goes out of business.
Firm C succeeded because it was more efficient than A, either by offering better goods, better services or lower prices. Firm B adapted its own practices to remain competitive with Firm C.
The customers in market X are now more productive because the
Re:False premise (Score:4, Interesting)
Uber and Amazon are arguably technological advancements, although the former isn't obviously a boon to productivity. Amazon though is the culmination of many technological advancements. At some point if you use enough ingredients in a new way you have a transformative technology on its own, and I think Amazon qualifies. It is a tremendous help to productivity, it comes at a cost, but I don't spend a lot of time driving around town to find things anymore, I type it in a search bar and get presented with 60 different versions of it within 5 seconds. Then a day later I have that thing, and the fact that I can have the thing a day later is itself the product of a few advances.
It's not sexy, you won't be taking it to alpha centauri in 15 minutes, but it lets us do more in less time.
Re:Much more than a false premise (Score:4, Insightful)
He does mention wage disparity, but that is due to Government activity, not the Market.
This why anarchy, a total absence of government activity, always results in everyone having the same wage.
Wait, what?
Re:Much more than a false premise (Score:4, Insightful)
The same line of reasoning could be applied to criminal justice. Perhaps if we got rid of the meddling government, we could allow a heretofore unknown or suppressed method of human social behavior to actually do a better job of promoting harmony between individuals in society. After all, look at failed states all over the world. The lack of central government brings with it both economic equality and civil tranquility.
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It does not fly in the face of reason. Although perhaps it does fly in the face of conventional wisdom today which is why you think it is absurd.
Question: We have government today, and have had such for 227 years (starting at the Constitution). Have wages *ever* been equal? In that entire time?
So why do you believe that it is so impossible that the action of government is responsible for such?
I can't say what you personally believe, but a lot of people have this conception of less government creating thi
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"Productivity" is a result of numerous things, and primarily related to Freedom.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding your analysis, but my understanding of "productivity", and how that relates to the large economy and to the American middle class specifically, has nothing to do with "Freedom" or any other such political categorization. In todays political climate, the use of the word Freedom usually shows up right before things like polemics and hyperbole.
My understanding of productivity, as how it relates to our economy, is better defined by Wikipedia. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Much more than a false premise (Score:4, Funny)
Oh boo hoo.
"I can't do whetever I want with toxic chemicals because of regulations designed to prevent abuse and widespread environmental damage. Woe is me."
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Those regulations you hate so much wouldn't be needed if the shitheel companies hadn't fucked over the environment in countless ways already.
Well, see, what happened was... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can tell you exactly what happened. People kept being told if they worked harder they'd be rewarded. So they worked harder and harder.
Now, the loudest voices from the conservatives (the group telling everyone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work harder) are saying "we never claimed there was a guarantee of a reward" and "shut your whiny entitled mouth" when the highest-producing people in recorded history ask for their reward.
So now the productivity gravy train has come to a screeching halt. Now that the rug of empty promises has been yanked out from under them, the people are showing no interest in working harder for nothing.
Re:Well, see, what happened was... (Score:4, Insightful)
So they worked harder and harder.
That's the problem. They need to work smarter. Working harder will only get you so far.
Re:Well, see, what happened was... (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is, there are no rewards for working harder or smarter, except perhaps survival.
The rewards only come from making other people work harder and smarter.
That's best done via threats, empty promises and reducing the number of available jobs while increasing the number of people.
Re:Well, see, what happened was... (Score:4, Insightful)
How anyone can vote for him after watching that is beyond me.
I'm not sure I understand your point, are you saying that you're pro-starving-the-poor-to-death? Or are you just taking a quote out of context to try and rile up the frothing-at-the-mouth-libertarian crowd?
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"Working smarter" is management jargon which means "this problem can't be solved, so I'm going to blame you for not solving it. No raise this year, and put in more unpaid overtime."
Working smarter on my IT job means writing a script to perform a task in the background while doing something else. My employment contracts for the last 10+ years have prohibited me from working more than 40 hours per week. No Fortune 500 company wants to pay overtime for anything these days.
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Re:Well, see, what happened was... (Score:5, Insightful)
Media plays a large role in this (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is people just don't realize how well they have it these days
That is incredibly true - a big part of this is that the media which should be researching and pointing this out, is instead over-dramatizing every small problem encountered to a degree that over time, things LOOK worse and worse even as they get better.
Re:Media plays a large role in this (Score:5, Insightful)
"In tonight's special, we'll examine how we have smartphones and Xbox and super-safe cars now, and how these easily make up for the fact that you'll have a vastly harder time than your parents or grandparents did making the money to pay for these things, or getting the job that could let you pay for these things, or paying for the ridiculous level of education that could let you get the job that could pay for these things, or the house you might want to own in which to put these things and maybe raise a family at some point.
Quadcopters! Netflix! And the minor annoying quibbles they totally overshadow, on tonight's EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!"
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"Vastly harder" to earn as much is a gross overstatement. There is lots of opportunity for those that simply write well and work hard.
Are you suggesting that younger people are just a bunch of lazy illiterate bums (OK, we are mostly total shit at spelling and grammar, but the world accepts this now, and my unusual ability to spell hasn't done anything for me) or is there some other reason why they need to work harder and write better, on average, than previous generations? It has to be one of the two if it's due to work ethic and writing ability.
Forgot to mention reading comprehension (Score:3, Insightful)
Where did I say they needed to work harder and write better than previous generations? I said to work hard, not hardER.
I guess you can add reading comprehension to the list, so they actually understand the communications people send. Also the ability to let perceived outrage diminish as it's all too easy to take offense where none is meant. That's just a super valuable life skill all by itself.
Last word for me, I've said what was needed:
but the world accepts this now
And that... is why you fail.
Re:Well, see, what happened was... (Score:5, Insightful)
A rising tide lifts all boats
Which is great if you can afford a boat.
Re:Well, see, what happened was... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd agree that the average worker now is better off now than someone from 100 years ago. That said, I can't always say the same ting about the average worker compared to someone just 30 years ago.
Back in the 80's, you could still get a manufacturing job with a high school diploma that paid about $15 an hour that had decent health benefits and a retirement plan. Sure, it was hard work, but you could raise a family on it.
That same worker today will probably end up working as a Starbucks Barista or Walmart cashier working for $8 an hour with no retirement plan and a health plan that they probably can't afford. These same people end up needing food stamps to feed their family.
Re:Well, see, what happened was... (Score:4, Insightful)
Blame the neoliberals. Hayek and Mises started the ideology which has destroyed incentive for everyone except the rich.
Here's a good history and insight into the problem:
http://www.theguardian.com/boo... [theguardian.com]
"Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve."
"Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers."
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What is the incentive to work, if everything you need is given to you by the sweat of others?
it is a sad state when people are willing to fight and die for the produce of others, but not their own self worth.
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"we never claimed there was a guarantee of a reward"
You make it sound terrible, it's called "equality of opportunity." Also available in the jungle!
Totally wrong (Score:5, Funny)
There may have been a pause but with us all being on the cusp of so many different breakthrough technologies, like 3D printing, self-driving cars, advances in AI, and lots more exotic stuff coming to fruition in materials research we can easily have another such burst of productivity.
Don't let the pessimists get you down, greatness is always incomprehensible to them and they cannot see it coming even if beaten over the head with it.
Re:Totally wrong (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Totally wrong (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not going to argue about advancements in AI with what is plainly an AI judging by your username.
Re:Totally wrong (Score:5, Funny)
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"Deep learning" is a meaningless term.
No it isn't. It refers to the deep structure of the neural nets, as opposed to the traditional 3 layer ANN which is the minimum theoretically required to fit any function. Specifically the deep nets operate on the raw data without a feature extraction phase[*], so the system both learns a feature extraction system and a classifier based off those features. In this way, it replaces the hand designed features.
A 3 layer net can't do that, so it has to learn both together
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AI beating a top human player at Go
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/i... [wired.com]
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Re:Totally wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
AI is "just algorithms". Your brain is "just algorithms".
There's a classic phenomena whereby as soon as a problem considered to require AI is solved, it is defined away as "not really AI". This happened with Chess, with Go, with automated vehicles, with handwriting recognition, with facial recognition... every one was claimed to be the domain of "real intelligence", right up until computers could do them as well as humans.
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Google's Go program didn't learn to win at Go by programmers telling it how to do it, it learned by playing a lot of games and gradually improving. Same way people get good at Go.
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Speaking of things that are over... (Score:5, Insightful)
"TED Talks" ran their course some time ago.
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I lost all remaining respect for TED when they effectively censored [highexistence.com] Nick Hanauer's "Rich People Don't Create Jobs."
Greed happened (Score:5, Insightful)
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What you don't get is that America's comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] is bullshit, AKA "marketing".
Science and math are the same in Timbuktu as here, so science and math brains are a cheap commodity on the world market. We cannot compete here on those.
All the bullshit financial and tech fads and bubbles start in USA for a reason.
About the only time funds from other count
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What you don't get is that America's comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] is bullshit, AKA "marketing".
I argue that marketing is not "bullshit." Marketing is the information exchange process to link consumers with the products that they desire. It is not easy and effortless, it takes great effort on the part of both consumer and vendor to effectively information match needs with goods.
And yes, sometimes consumers don't know what they need before marketing. This isn't just an issue with consumer goods, i
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Tata Consulting and Wipro are masters at it.
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Actually, that's not quite true, although our business administration has somewhat faltered. Better business techniques would be a good technology to study...
We can see the slow-down of technological growth after 1970 [wordpress.com], even though new technology kept coming. Still, a smaller percent of the total income (and of the individual's income for most individuals and families) goes toward the same goods each year, and people buy more and better things ("better" actually abstracts from "more": your car has power
Re:Greed happened (Score:5, Insightful)
Thomas Edison was a businessman.
Thomas Edison built things. Most business people today, especially the Wall Street MBAs, are too busy slicing and dicing a smaller financial pie.
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So does Donald Trump.
We are talking about business, not politics.
His motivation was money, not the love of science and technology.
Thomas Edison built things that benefited people and he made money in the process. A Wall Street MBA creating an algorithm to squeeze a tenth of a penny out of each financial transaction doesn't do anything for the overall economy.
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I see it in the PC vs. the smartphone (Score:5, Interesting)
While companies are busy measuring smartphone sales as some proxy for how well the industry is doing (and calling the PC market dead), I see a difference between PCs as machines used to do things, and smartphones as ways to waste time. Obviously this isn't exactly true, but in general it is. This is why smartphones have replaced PCs in popularity - people would rather waste time than do work. The media is so focused on getting our "attention" rather than helping us get things done, and we're so connected to that media now, that in my opinion it's obvious why productivity is falling. People aren't really working when they're "working" anymore. They're just distracted.
Also, don't discount the importance of air conditioning in US productivity, especially in the southern US.
That said, there could be a new jump in productivity as better technologies are developed. What if we counteracted smartphones with a drug or a widget that could make you focus?
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This is why smartphones have replaced PCs in popularity - people would rather waste time than do work
Yes, but now we can waste time anywhere/everywhere...
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col. mustard, aerospace sector, soybean blight (Score:5, Funny)
For at least the last hundred years, they've been writing economics books like really boring Mad Libs:
"The __(segment of economy)__ is going to __(boom/crash)__ in the next __(time window)__ because __(jaggedy line graph of the economy)__ looks a lot like __(other jaggedy line graph that turns sharply up or down)__."
It must be nice to be able to pick your doctoral thesis with a dart board.
Sigh... (Score:3)
I hope that Gordon's prediction is incorrect, but being in the manufacturing industry and seeing the new hires come and go makes me worry.
The millennials are for the most part lazy and dependent. They can't function without their cell phones and this is inside a plant where cell phones are prohibited except for management and supervisors.
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It isn't just their cell phones and other electronic gadgets that make the millennials useless lumps (although as distractions, they are not helpful), it is their parents and teachers who never get Johnny and Sally to think on hard math and science problems. The whole idea of spending a few days working on a math problem is inconceivable to them. It isn't that they think should get it a short amount of time, it is that if they do not get it in a short amount of time, they figure it is beyond them and they c
Re:Sigh... (Score:5, Insightful)
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spending a few days working on a math problem
Wasn't this known earlier as the MTV generation [wikipedia.org]?
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I hope that Gordon's prediction is incorrect, but being in the manufacturing industry and seeing the new hires come and go makes me worry.
Yet Manufacturing Sector: Real Output Per Hour [stlouisfed.org] is at all time highs.
Counter-anecdote (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the hiring practices at your company need improvement? Or maybe you need to adapt more? What does "can't function without their cell phones" mean exactly anyways?
"the young men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of luxury and idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are incapable of resisting either pleasure or pain."
- Plato, The Republic, 380 BC
Interconnection (Score:5, Interesting)
The "problem" with interconnection is that it propagates outside of just Internet and device-to-device linking.
During the last few decades it has become increasingly easier for people to not only communicate but to travel and work together (or fight), no matter where they are.
This means:
- Salaries across the world are slowly trending towards a midpoint. This will suck for more developed countries and will boost lesser developed countries.
- Productivity will likewise even out: countries where people work 6h a day will no longer be able to sustain that work style. Similarly, countries where people work 12h a day, 6-7 days a week will slowly roll down to less than that.
- Cultures will clash. They already do and it's not pretty. Some countries' culture is 500 years back: they will have to go through a deep transformation to reach present time, or they will bring down more evolved cultures - and then productivity will be the least of our worries as a species.
We could have continued (Score:5, Insightful)
We could have continued increasing productivity, at least into the foreseeable future.
I remember a couple of decades ago when telecommuting became possible (roughly 1990), and the IRS stepped in with rules that made it less inviting as an option. Among other things, you couldn't deduct the expenses of your home office, and you could no longer be a consultant (1099), you still had to be a regular employee (W-2). Unless, of course, you were a doctor, lawyer, or architect - those three professions were excepted from the rule.
A little later, someone pointed out that GE pays no taxes (among many other businesses), leading to the conclusion that it's nigh impossible to start a business that makes a competing product.
Microsoft did its "embrace, extend, extinguish" thing to a bunch of other companies. Microsoft would "consider purchasing" your software business, sign an NDA and send in some engineers to check out the internals and otherwise determine the fitness of the purchase, choose not to purchase, then come out with a competing product 6 months later.
This happened so many times it became a meme.
(Let's not forget that Microsoft illegally forced itself on many computers. Whole companies sprang up to deal with viruses and other security exploits, while a viable alternative floundered. The first person to purchase a computer and return the Windows software got sued by Microsoft, and had to justify his actions.)
We gave the telecom companies $200 billion [newnetworks.com] to bring everyone up to broadband. They took the money and did nothing - much of the country can't get internet access, Comcast can be the most hated [thewire.com] company in America, and mobile phone service is spotty, the quality is choppy, and the communications insecure.
We give away our productivity and resources to other countries for little or no gain, we've been neglecting our roads and bridges, our electric service is outdated and increasingly unreliable, our health care is third-world-class. Our education is top-heavy with administration and mindless rules, and the cost of extended education burdens the student for the rest of their life.
(It's really hard to start a new business, make an innovative invention or do scientific research, when you're burdened with education expenses for the rest of your life, have to hold down a low-paying job just to survive because the high-paying one was outsourced to a H1B, can't get good internet service, and are forced to use Windows compatible software, and have to purchase health insurance at $5,000 per year per family member.)
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This is in stark contrast with, for example, America of the 1920s. Reading newspaper articles of the times shows that the country was hopping with ideas. Just about everyone on the street in NYC had ideas on how to start a business, invent a new machine, or otherwise make their fortune in America.
Immigration was easy, just show up and get registered. Immigration was a self-selecting evolutionary sieve for people who were smart and could get along with other groups. You had to leave your family, community and support system behind, and learn a new language, culture, and laws. But if you could do it, you could make enough money to have the rest of your family come over to join you.
(Nowadays it takes 10 years and $30,000 for a Russian (to use an example) to emigrate to the US... if you win the immigration lottery.)
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My point for all this is that we *could* still be having increases in productivity. If we just eased up on all the arbitrary unfairness and burden we place on the people, The electronics revolution isn't quite over yet, the internet revolution is about half over, there's a ton of room for innovation in medical sciences, and the bio revolution is just getting started. (And the start of the AI revolution might be very cl
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burdened with education expenses for the rest of your life
The median college debt is $29k. Not only that, but
The college premium (the difference between the earnings of college graduates and high school graduates) is at its highest level ever.
This means that it is easier to pay of a loan now than if you had graduated in the 1970's, 80's or 90's.
34.4 percent graduated with no debt.
12.0 percent graduated with $1-$9,999 in debt.
18.2 percent graduated with $10,000-$19,999 in debt.
15.5 percent graduated with $20,000-$29,999 in debt.
8.9 percent graduated with $30,000-$39,999 in debt.
5.3 percent graduated with $40,000-$49,999 in debt.
5.3 percent graduated with $50,0
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The "average American worker"... (Score:5, Insightful)
is more and more likely to be made of silicon and steel. Automation is rendering the productive capacity of individual human beings less and less relevant. With production efficiencies at historic highs and still increasing rapidly, we should ALL have a great standard of living and a great quality of life - lots of time for creative pursuits, and friends and family, without working our fingers to the bone. But NO - workweeks are getting longer, more people have multiple jobs, and average incomes, (except for the elites), are dropping. Why do you think that is?
Fuck the "headwinds" - the clear and present danger to a healthy, happy future for most of us is extreme-and-still-growing wealth concentration. We need to tackle the truly Herculean task of re-engineering our social institutions, our cultural and historical and religious biases, our mass propag.., er, media infrastructure, and our fundamental outlook on social hierarchies. All the pearls of wisdom from all the pundits in the world are just more circuses - distractions from the job of building sane and fair societies for ourselves and our children.
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For my parents and grandparents generations productivity was in the hands of almost any healthy person regardless of their level of education. You could chop down trees and make a good living, or drill for oil. Going back even farther, land was readily available for conversion to farming.
The world has moved on and it's harder for millions at the bottom end of the scale to contribute to overall productivity now that natural resources are not able to sustain growth at their original rates.
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there's an inflection, all right. (Score:2)
Our grandparents' parents electric lights and telephone are now the internet and wireless and google and wikipedia -- nearly instant access to nearly the sum of human knowledge nearly anywhere.
There's an inflection in the productivity graph, yes, but it is opposite of what Gordon says, productivity will go up, not just in the USA but worldwide.
Ran out of frontier. Change is too fast. (Score:4, Interesting)
Drastic cuts, old wealth disappearing, new order emerging etc held something at bay in Europe.
America had its own internal frontier. As long as the frontier was moving west and more land came under the till the population growth kept it going. World war II and the baby boom helped it going farther.
Finally we have run out of frontiers both in Europe and America. But that is merely the space frontier, the time frontier is endless. The next generation, always larger than the previous in sheer numbers will provide the demand needed to create more jobs than lost. But the pace is furious and is acceleration. Society does not have the time to adjust or grow to create more demand.
The world simply does not have the energy and material needed to provide first world comfort to the third world. But efficiency gains in material and energy use, as well as labor use, can create the demand needed to keep all the world employed gainfully.
Improving the living conditions of the third world is how we can create jobs in the first world. We need to promote trade that will genuinely improve the lives of the people of the third world, not trade policies driven by tax dodgers, job outsources, and environment scofflaws.
America Favors People Who Don't Work (Score:4, Interesting)
No, not the welfare recipients. American laws and tax structures favors people who have money, use people to their, and game the system.
Just a though experiment:
A person works to make $100; they can expect to end up with $70 in their paycheck.
If someone's rich relative gives them $100, they get $80.
What utter bullshit. The person doing nothing gets more, and they procreate, breeding more people who provide no benefit.
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A person works to make $100; they can expect to end up with $70 in their paycheck.
Earned income has the highest tax rates. Most people who are familiar with the tax laws try to derive most of their income from portfolio (investments) and passive (real estate) income.
If someone's rich relative gives them $100, they get $80.
Under the IRS rules, the gift has to be over $14,000 before taxes come into play. So your example is bogus.
https://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/Frequently-Asked-Questions-on-Gift-Taxes#5 [irs.gov]
The person doing nothing gets more, and they procreate, breeding more people who provide no benefit.
They're the ones who are cleaning your toilets, harvesting your food and doing the jobs you don't want to do
Re:To quote Dylan... (Score:4, Insightful)
"de-regulation?"
Economically significant regulatory rules are those that, among other things, "Have an annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more or adversely affect in a material way the economy, a sector of the economy, productivity, competition, jobs, the environment, public health or safety, or State, local or tribal governments or communities..." (Executive Order 12866 [reginfo.gov])
Clinton issued a total of 361 economically significant rules and Bush issued 358. As of the end of January 2016, Obama had 393 with another 47 on the drawing board (Obama's Midnight [cato.org]).
Obama has been issuing 55 economically significant regulations per year of his administration. Clinton's and Bush's record aren't much better. Over-regulation is a more likely culprit or reduced productivity.
On your other points, I can't recall how unions have contributed to productivity nor how greed necessarily decreases productivity.
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happened in the US .... technology...
I have a friend in a former soviet bloc country who makes the exact complaints. Not only that, they are far more racist, particularly against the Chinese for all of the imports into their country and how he can't go into a store anymore without being surrounded by Pagaminta Kinijoje.
Re:Thanks, Obama! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes!
He didn't trigger the Great Recession. Financial deregulation is the major cause. We can see this because countries who kept their regulations in place didn't have mortgage crashes.
Although bubbles in general are perhaps inevitable in capitalism, being they've been happening for 400-odd years and nobody has figured out how to stop them. We may learn to prevent a given TYPE of bubble, but we invent new types.
Re:Thanks, Obama! (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a huge exaggeration. The CRA laws merely meant that loanee's neighborhood can't be used as a factor to reject loans. CRA said ZERO about skipping income verification. Most of the problem loans were NOT in so-called minority neighborhoods. I lived in S. Calif. during the crash, and saw where the foreclosures were with my own eyes. The "minority" houses were usually closer to the center of town, and thus kept a lot of their resell value even during the slump. The outskirts took the biggest hit.
Do you have a link on this?
And if true, why did so many banks croak during the crash? If FM was to back most their loans, they'd still be alive. (Most later bailouts were not thru FM.)
You blame "big gov't", but high interest rates would be more gov't interference. It seems a contradiction. If gov't didn't regulate interest rates at all, the rates would be as low or as high as banks wanted. And the fed rate doesn't prevent banks from charging higher rates from the fed rate, it only sets the floor. Therefore, "low" was not forced upon the banks.
The banks voluntarily got themselves in hot water. They voluntarily skipped background checks, largely because they wanted to quickly re-sell them to a bigger sucker bank before it all crashed down. Ponzi-ish. They knew their slime.
Many did go out of biz. The only reason there were some bailouts is because the banks were too big to fail: they'd take the entire econ with them if most failed. If anti-trust were enforced, they perhaps would not be too big to take econ down with them.
Banks are key infrastructure for good or bad. Key infrastructure usually has to be regulated to some degree, otherwise companies would hold civilization hostage for cash, kind of like OPEC.