Why the US Could Be On the Cusp of a Productivity Boom 129
Neil Irwin reports via Axios: The dearth of productivity growth over the last couple of decades has held back incomes in the U.S. and other rich countries, according to a report out Wednesday from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the global consultancy. Productivity growth has been weak in the U.S. and Western Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, but things looked better among many emerging markets. The McKinsey report finds that global labor productivity growth was 2.3% a year from 1997 to 2022, a rapid rate that has increased incomes and quality of life in large parts of the world. China and India account for the largest portion of that surge -- half of overall global productivity improvement, with other emerging markets accounting for another 25%, led by Central and Eastern Europe and emerging Asian economies.
In the U.S., the report finds that the decline in capital investment following the 2008 financial crisis has resulted in a $4,500 lower per-capita GDP in 2022 than it would have if pre-crisis trends had continued. Rapid advances in manufacturing technology, especially for electronics, petered out in the same time period, subtracting another $5,000 from per-capita GDP. "Digitization was much discussed as the main candidate to rev up productivity again, but its impact failed to spread beyond" the tech sector, the authors write. The authors are optimistic that a confluence of factors will make the years ahead different.
The rise in global interest rates and inflation are evidence of stronger global demand. Many countries are experiencing labor shortages that may incentivize more productivity-enhancing investment. And artificial intelligence and related technologies create big opportunities. "Inflationary pressure and rising interest rates could be signs that we are leaving behind secular stagnation and entering an era of higher demand and investment," the report finds. "In corporate boardrooms around the world right now, there's a tremendous amount of conversation associated with [generative] AI, and I think there's a broad acknowledgment that this could very much transform productivity at the company level," Olivia White, a McKinsey senior partner and co-author of the report, tells Axios. "Another thing that's happening right now is the conversation about labor. Labor markets in all advanced economies, and the U.S. is really sort of top of the heap, are very, very tight right now. So there's a lot of conversation around what do we do to make the people that we have as productive as they can be?"
In the U.S., the report finds that the decline in capital investment following the 2008 financial crisis has resulted in a $4,500 lower per-capita GDP in 2022 than it would have if pre-crisis trends had continued. Rapid advances in manufacturing technology, especially for electronics, petered out in the same time period, subtracting another $5,000 from per-capita GDP. "Digitization was much discussed as the main candidate to rev up productivity again, but its impact failed to spread beyond" the tech sector, the authors write. The authors are optimistic that a confluence of factors will make the years ahead different.
The rise in global interest rates and inflation are evidence of stronger global demand. Many countries are experiencing labor shortages that may incentivize more productivity-enhancing investment. And artificial intelligence and related technologies create big opportunities. "Inflationary pressure and rising interest rates could be signs that we are leaving behind secular stagnation and entering an era of higher demand and investment," the report finds. "In corporate boardrooms around the world right now, there's a tremendous amount of conversation associated with [generative] AI, and I think there's a broad acknowledgment that this could very much transform productivity at the company level," Olivia White, a McKinsey senior partner and co-author of the report, tells Axios. "Another thing that's happening right now is the conversation about labor. Labor markets in all advanced economies, and the U.S. is really sort of top of the heap, are very, very tight right now. So there's a lot of conversation around what do we do to make the people that we have as productive as they can be?"
How to make people productive? (Score:2, Insightful)
Pay them. Money is the best motivation.
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Re:How to make people productive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some low productivity countries are missing ingredient A, some ingredient B, and those that are really at the bottom are missing both.
Re:How to make people productive? (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't.
This has been confirmed time and time again.
It's only a motivation up to the point where people can get good and shelter and even than not so strongly as economists would like.
Thing is people are not "rationa"l economic machines. And I mean rational in the economist sense of maximising money, because to me that's not rational: you can't take it with you and money alone doesn't achieve anything. All the money on the world doesn't help if you have no time to enjoy it.
I quit my last job with was very well paid, and took a lot of time off. My next job will be much less well paid, but more fun, more interesting, much it's stressful and more useful to the world in general. If I was motivated by money I'd go into HFT. I know plenty of people more than good enough to get into finance careers, but they choose not to.
No the best way or to pay decently, offer a good work life balance, plenty of holidays, minimize the soul sucking bullshit, make due three work is meaningful.
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And tell us, how much money do you have in the bank? Do you own your house? Your transportation? How much debt do you have?
It's very easy to quit your job, take a bunch of time off, and then take reduced pay at your next employer when all your needs are met.
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that's kind of the point, right?
If I was motivated by money I'd stay in the mill. But now I've got enough to be stable with some saved for retirement so I can enjoy life a bit and not keep collecting money. My old job was offering me lots of money, but I declined it to get my physical and mental health back on track. The lack of stress was more of a motivation than yet more money.
So yes it is easy when it needs are met, but that's the point, right?
And in answer to your specific questions, I have a house, no
Re: How to make people productive? (Score:2)
So you don't need to work for a lot of money; you've already secured your needs and acheived your goals. You're not motivated by money because of that, and honestly, that's great.
But don't make the mistake of thinking that everyone is in your position. Most people are motivated by money, because they're striving, (in many cases fruitlessly,) to achieve what you've achieved.
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You appear to be in violent agreement
I know very well few people are as lucky as me, and most people need money to make rent and buy food.
But money as an end in itself is not a major motivating factor for most people. The GPs assertion that they need to pay more doesn't work that well. I was being offered a lot more money but I don't take it. Why? Because money intrinsically is not a strong motivator. People need money because they need food.
Re: How to make people productive? (Score:2)
Got any economic data to crack that up?
Yes, if you actually knew what you were talking about, you'd be able to point to total employed persons and average weekly hours for all employees in the US and see something like a 0.2% unadjusted decline, which I guess is like the boss letting us full-time employees go a full 5 minutes early on Friday. Your MAGA insistence that the economy is bad is truly admirable for its ignorance.
Re: How to make people productive? (Score:5, Interesting)
The economy for normal people is fucked. Inflation kills working people who depend on a salary or hourly wage and utterly destroys anyone on a fixed income such as the elderly and disabled.
Inflation has mostly come back down but the prices remain permantly higher. Inflation is the rate at which prices increase. Coming back down does not decrease prices, it just brings the rate of further increases down to a slowly rate upwards.
Thankfully you don't set fiscal policy.
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The REAL reason Donald Trump deserved to lose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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If you really think blatant sexual assault is "putting the moves on" a woman, YOU should be in jail.
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Trump proudly bragged he sexually assaulted women regularly. And you called it just flirting. Then you said, ok, no, it's sexual assault, but someone accused Biden of doing it, too, so it's OK! So which is it, dirtbag?
And nope, as much as I dislike Biden, you haven't proved Joe Biden did anything like that. Maybe he did, if proved I'll condemn it equally. But it's just an accusation he denies, possibly a politically motivated on (see Kavanaugh and Thomas).
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Ok, little rapist.
Re: How to make people productive? (Score:2)
Re: How to make people productive? (Score:3)
if by "a few months" you mean a year, ok. But don't let almost two full years of real wages rising stop your desired narrative.
You do realize the vast majority of people on "fixed incomes" have incomes fixed by government policy, right? Why should I, or anyone, have sympathy for the results of a decision made by a r
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Most Americans are not so far in debt that inflation is good for them. They still need to eat which costs their income minus the cost of food. If their income doesn't go up as fast as inflation then they continue to lose and have to take on even more debt to survive.
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Nah. It actually seems to make people lazy. "All that money" rolling in.
True. Look at the Boeing CEO, or the CEO of Kellogg's who's sole job is agree to raising prices while telling people they should eat cereal for supper [cnn.com] if prices are too high, and other executives who are absolutely lazy as shit but still get paid millions each year.
Clearly the answer is to cut their salaries to the bone to make them more productive.
Hand Kristian Graebener = StoneToss
More productivity isn't necessarily a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
If increased productivity meant a reduction in work hours, that would be a massive increase in lifestyle for most people.
Reality is that a sudden and broad increase in productivity in the economy will mean much higher unemployment as employers expect to leverage new tools to have fewer people working for them to save on wages and benefits. And with the unemployment spike will come a massive recession and then even those who kept their jobs will start to lose them.
Our economic system as it stands today is not capable of gracefully adjusting to massive changes without accompanying social disruptions.
all those IT they've been laying off (Score:4, Insightful)
Between making people work harder to make up for all those jobs they canceled and pushing for AI tools to help many are betting they won't have to rehire as many as they actually fired (they announce more than they fire because it sounds good to investors.)
AI won't replace many jobs but it'll boost productivity to eliminate far far more.
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Investors don't care. Most investing today is done by high speed trade automation looking at raw financials,
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Do you happen to have a citation on this? Because I've read way too many stories of how SpaceX's information is much more limited than, say, Tesla's, with the difference being that the prior is a closely held non-publicly traded company, while the latter is.
Is there additional information required if you go over 500 employees? Probably. Is it still as much as a publicly traded company? I don't think so.
Re:More productivity isn't necessarily a good thin (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never seen worker productivity increasing be a good thing for anything but the C-levels. For example, by moving to computers, automated build sequences, an average worker can do in about four hours what it took someone in the 60s-70s a week to do, be it email, getting memos done (no need to type or write them), and do their jobs. After the 1990s, the added productivity really didn't go into the wallets of the workers at all, but Wall Street went from three digits to five, which shows where the money went.
A productivity job won't mean more jobs. Most companies will still be scarfing from overseas because of no regulations, lax labor laws and cheap wages, even if this happens. Barring World War III starting, which will make offshoring infeasible, a boom isn't going to help the average US worker. It will help India and other BRICS countries, but not the US.
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Increased productivity went into lower prices.
For example, in the 60s prior to modern automation food was so expensive that hunger was a real issue and obesity barely existed. The opposite is true today. People of all wealth levels are fighting obesity. We give food away. Ever tried to give food to a homeless person and be told they only accept cash?
We live in amazing times.
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It didn't. It should, but it didn't.
In what we call "developed" countries, famines were a past already half a century ago. Yes, until then, that equation held true: More productivity meant more food, more food means more people don't starve. That was for a very long time a critical factor in our economy. It hasn't been for more than half a century now.
What can be said, though, is that certain foods kept their price despite inflation. The price of sugar for example barely moved since the 1970s, at the very l
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You realize the 60s was more than half a century ago? No before automation and the big greening of farming?
What point are you going for? Or are you agreeing with me and just supporting my point?
As far as housing, the typical house used to be much smaller than today. You need to look at price per square foot not price per home to have apples to apples and drop the top and bottom 5% where the numbers are in la la land extremes.
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Why would you need to adjust for home size? Size shouldnt be important for this as people need homes, they dont need large homes though. If all there is are large homes on the market that doesnt do anything to change the fact that everyone needs to live in one of them which means paying for them (either through direct purchase or rent).
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Because if you get a bigger better thing you should pay more. How is that not obvious?
There are smaller homes but people buy bigger homes than they need, faster bigger cars than they need, more toys than they need and certainly more of everything than people had in the 60s.
Why shouldn't a better lifestyle cost more?
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As I was getting at before because a home is a fixed need (as in everyone needs one). If the price of a home goes up it's going to hurt a lot of people financially whether they're getting more for their money or not.
Re:More productivity isn't necessarily a good thin (Score:4, Insightful)
Where are these smaller homes? They're not for sale, that's for sure. In my market, the average size of a home for sale is 2,170 sq ft. And I'm living in a solidly middle class area.
GP's point stands - people need a place to live. And the size of the house is irrelevant if all that's available is McMansions.
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Don't forget features. Go back to the '60s, going by the talk of my parents:
1. Far less electrical capacity, though in the USA it probably had electricity. You might see 1 outlet in a room, or it might be 1 per wall.
2. Far less likely to have air conditioning. I remember reading that part of the attraction of theaters was them having air conditioning.
3. Fewer appliances - less likely to have a dishwasher, clothes washers/dryers, etc...
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Government has 4 levers to pull: Tax, Subsidise, Ban, and Promote. This is a local maxima issue. Businesses cut employees because that leads to immediate small profits. Reducing hours instead leads to short-term lower profits and potentially long-term higher profits as a population working fewer hours is more productive per hour, and has more leisure time that they will pay to do stuff in. Government may have to think of a way to adjust those levers to encourage the adoption of shorter working hours for mor
Productivity: Code word for Unemployment (Score:2)
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> you can see wealth distribution is still going backwards
And this is the ultimate madness. NOBODY is worth billions more than the next person. I would even argue that nobody should be allowed to have more wealth than required to maintain what is currently a 'middle class' lifestyle for the remainder of their life without working. Anything over that should be subject to a wealth tax that draws you back down to an acceptable level of wealth. It's just obscene that we have large numbers of people who h
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Worker productivity has been increasing, but wages have been stagnant for 50 years now. In the past, and through much of the 20th century, wages rose as productivity rose. This was generally good - the company did better, you earned more money, so you generally wanted the company to do better. And during these heady 70s and 80s (really, not that long ago), the CEO's pay was "outrageous" if it was 20 times the average worker's pay.
Today, productivity is way higher. The CEO's pay is 600 or more times the work
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Worker productivity has been increasing, but wages have been stagnant for 50 years now. In the past, and through much of the 20th century, wages rose as productivity rose. This was generally good - the company did better, you earned more money, so you generally wanted the company to do better.
Why do workers deserve more money because of productivity increases? The productivity improvements have been due to automation and computerization, not due to people working harder or better. In fact, the average weekly hours continues to drop, people are working less for the same salary. The employees didn't outlay any capital to buy this automation and didn't take any risk to implement it, so why should they receive the rewards?
Say a factory has 100 employees and puts out $1 million worth of goods each
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>Why do workers deserve more money because of productivity increases?
Why do the business owners deserve it? Whatever is amplifying productivity, until robots are doing everything it all comes from 'workers'. The only reason a business exists as a thing is because of the society that creates and maintains the environment in which it exists. There's nothing wrong with that society deciding that wealth disparity needs capping.
The problem with unregulated capitalism is that while it encourages investment
Why United States vs Elsewhere (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why United States vs Elsewhere (Score:5, Informative)
Its not clear to me why people would choose to invest in the United States instead of emerging markets if the emerging markets provide better opportunities for growth....
It's complex of course, one of the big reasons is the weaker institutions in emerging markets. There's corruption, bribes, weaker and uncertain legal systems, extensive byzantine bureaucracy, and significant political risk. Logistical institutions are also weaker, transportation infrastructure is poor, logistical providers (truck companies) often don't exist or aren't at sufficient scale. Capital markets are weak, labor is typically cheaper but hard to gauge the quality of, and raw materials are often of varying quantity. These factors intersect too, if your raw material provider messes you around then you may not have the expected legal recourse to fix the problem.
All these institutional issues add expenses, drag growth and create significant amounts of uncertainty. There are reasons why large companies are happy to source from emerging markets but very reluctant to significantly establish or invest there.
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Its not clear to me why people would choose to invest in the United States instead of emerging markets if the emerging markets provide better opportunities for growth....
It's complex of course, one of the big reasons is the weaker institutions in emerging markets. There's corruption, bribes, weaker and uncertain legal systems, extensive byzantine bureaucracy, and significant political risk.
Ironically enough, this sounds a lot like post-pandemic America.
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Who says it had to be either / or?
I have money in all the commonly known big name US corps, the no name mid corps and foreign corps, as well as emerging markets.
The big US corps are doing significantly better than the emerging markets in my portfolio. Those are high risk and usually unstable countries. High risk = potential high reward but it's not guaranteed. It's just potential. I also have a few mid American companies up 50% in only 7 months but that's not something you can plan on.
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Half right (Score:2)
We're definitely on track to accomplish the latter part of "productivity boom".
Eliminate jobs and labor, who will be able to buy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Our modern view of labor is kind of interesting. Where it was once seen as an asset to companies, now labor is a cost, a company liability, to be eliminated with automation, self-driving cars, etc. Efficiency is the name of the game. If it were possible to completely remove all employees from all processes, companies would do it in a heartbeat (can we replace CEOs with ChatGPT please?). Yet if that were really done, who, then, would be the customers and how would they afford even the cheapest goods?
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Because we fail to exact a price when treated badly.
Watch how quickly that would change with mass boycotts and strikes.
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Nah, they'll just hand out enough money to keep most people calm enough most of the time.
That's the point of UBI. "Don't riot and you'll get subsistence level cash for nothing".
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That's the point of UBI. "Don't riot and you'll get subsistence level cash for nothing".
With robots carrying guns, the ruling class will save the UBI money for themselves and just have their robots shoot anyone daring to riot.
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You think we're headed to a true sci-fi dystopia?
Who exactly is the ruling class in your scenario?
The filthy rich who now already owned the politicians, and in future, most of the robots.
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Effectively yes. They'll just have enough to be fed to do their slave labor to serve their masters. That's the end goal - that the 8B people are owned by the 1% and barely survive.
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Robots. Robots can randomnly order stuff from amazon. And they'll do it for cheaper.
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can we replace CEOs with ChatGPT please?
Sure. But it won't happen, if companies wanted to replace CEOs, they could have done so ages ago.
The Magic-8-ball was invented in 1946.
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If it were possible to completely remove all employees from all processes, companies would do it in a heartbeat (can we replace CEOs with ChatGPT please?). Yet if that were really done, who, then, would be the customers and how would they afford even the cheapest goods?
When that happened, companies will sell stuff for the robots (e.g. robot parts and maintenance services) and robot owners, rather than to the unemployed masses, that's the end game of capitalism and free market -- people without money is out of the market and hence not worth considering. Under Capitalism, penniless people starving on the streets is not a problem, but rich people not able to make more money is.
In that future, if you do not own some robots to serve you, you are penniless and worth nothing.
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If that happened, then you go the way of the horses, and the factories switch production to things that are still in demand by paying customers, such as guardbots and yachts.
time to go union! (Score:2)
time to go union!
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Our modern view of labor is kind of interesting. Where it was once seen as an asset to companies, now labor is a cost, a company liability, to be eliminated with automation, self-driving cars, etc. Efficiency is the name of the game. If it were possible to completely remove all employees from all processes, companies would do it in a heartbeat (can we replace CEOs with ChatGPT please?). Yet if that were really done, who, then, would be the customers and how would they afford even the cheapest goods?
That's a "not our problem" situation. The MBA mentality that we decry at every turn has infected our entire society. Every company is focused on profits only. As you say, labor is seen as a cost. And in MBA terms, all costs are subject to cutting, or if at all possible, elimination. And our government won't do a fucking thing about it because they run almost entirely based on the whims of Wall Street and the biggest money aggregators on the planet. The larger the company, the more sway they have with the go
The baseline is shifting (Score:2)
The Americans were very productive, since barriers to entry in many professions were too low. As that changed, the power balance between workers and employers shifted along with it.
If I wanted to write software, or open a blog, like this one Slashdot, all I needed was access to Internet and a very reasonable hosting fee. Today, online publishing is cornered by several large entities, like Medium or Substack, and if you want want to "blog" then Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and similar ones. Even your developer
Re:The baseline is shifting (Score:4, Insightful)
>Email provider? Don't even think about it. The "big three" (gmail, outlook, yahoo) will not even accept delivery of emails from your domain, and happily mark all incoming as spam.
This is simply not true. Put your mail server(s) on an IP block that isn't blacklisted, make sure you have your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up correctly, and that your ISP as a correct PTR record for your domain and you'll do just fine. It probably helps not to be on a consumer-grade ISP plan where they may block email ports.
There are FAR too many mail systems out there that don't belong to the 'big three' for them to block all of them without causing a mass exodus of their users.
You can even do all that as a complete nobody if you want to - I've been running my own mail server since the late 90s and never had a problem.
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Thank you
> This is simply not true. Put your mail server(s) on an IP block that isn't blacklisted, make sure you have your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up correctly, and that your ISP as a correct PTR record for your domain and you'll do just fine. It probably helps not to be on a consumer-grade ISP plan where they may block email ports.
None of these were necessary in the past. One can of course argue it is the cost of modern security. On the other hand it is also possible to see it raising the bar to entry
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>However it should also not be the case that the fundamental protocols like basic SMTP and IMAP are no longer enough.
The reason 'basic SMTP' is no longer enough is that the protocol was built with inherent trust of everything. All the add-ons since are attempts to limit the outcome of that early naive design decision.
If you don't block SMTP on residential IP blocks, you get spam bot nets. If you don't tack on public key signatures, you get impersonation. If you don't publish your authorized servers, y
It's an automation boom (Score:2)
We are at the Edge of a Lasting Depression (Score:2)
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It's a French word, 'voila', meaning 'there it is'.
'Walla' is something background actors might murmur to create indistinct sounds of conversation.
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Combines the verb voir (to see) with la (there). So, at least originally, it was "see/look there". There's also voici which combines voir with ceci (this) to make "see/look here". ceci is itself kind of "this here".
* la has a grave ` accent on the 'a', but...
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And in English now really carries a meaning of "Look at this interesting/entertaining thing I have revealed to you in an impressive manner".
Re: We are at the Edge of a Lasting Depression (Score:2)
That means a depression (Score:4, Insightful)
Corporations can't grow through efficiency or increased volume of sales so they're increasing the price: The decade where entry-level wages rose proportional to management is an aberration that will not be repeated.
It's also why management is fascinated with AI: It's about both, not paying employees and increasing volume. The problem is, every competitor is also switching to AI so the advantage is lost before it's realized.
The Endless Growth model of economics forgets an inconvenient truth: Sales come from people earning money. Mass-layoffs will result in reduced volume, and in an economy driven by fixed-costs and wealth-ownership (Capitalism), that means a depression. Governments will have to face the reality that endless-growth policies don't work, or collapse.
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Endless real growth is unsustainable, but nominal monetary "growth" can be infinite. You just keep sending out stimulus checks, and as long as you do it in response to crises that would otherwise be deflationary it won't cause the hyper-inflation that so many gold bugs (and later bitcoiners) have forecast. Instead, we'll slow-walk towards a mixed UBI/capitalist economy, maybe even a Star Trek economy or as some have joked, "Full Luxury Gay Space Communism". It has to be managed properly though, and that'
The Unemployable Boom. (Score:2)
Given how Greed in business has responded to toddler-grade AI by firing tens of thousands, I’d more say America is leading the unemployable boom that is coming, and will be inevitable without massive pushback.
I have no idea how Greed intends to life a happy prosperous life by creating a 25% unemployment rate, but Greed is bound and determined to find out. The hard way.
Not supported by the evidence (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Yes, I misread the post and thought he was disagreeing with you. I plead a caffeine deficiency this morning, which I am working to rectify.
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Are you sure you pray to the right god? (Score:2)
Rejoice, believers, we are heading into a productivity boom! Preach the prosperity gospel of how more productivity means we're better off!
Are we?
What good is a good that I cannot have?
The irony here is that we're working hard on failing for the exact opposite reason of why communism failed eventually: We will have the goods that people crave. But people will not have the means to buy them. Our economy will not collapse because of a lack of supply, we will break down under a lack of demand. Because if you co
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Influenza is just the 2020s version of the 1980s rockstars. Exactly the same shit. A lot of teenagers dream of that career, only a handful of them makes it and in the end, they realize that even those that "make it" get ripped off by the industry behind it.
The "Wild West" days of that pipe dream are over. Just like the 1960s Hippie-college-friends bands that somehow managed to "make" it turned into the industry cast and styled plastic bands of the 80s, the independent YouTubers that somehow had a great idea
Oh yeah (Score:2)
"Inflationary pressure and rising interest rates could be signs that we are leaving behind secular stagnation and entering an era of higher demand and investment," the report finds.
Yeah, just like the 1970s! Oh, wait ...
Summary starts with non-truth. (Score:2)
The dearth of productivity growth over the last couple of decades has held back incomes in the U.S. and other rich countries, according to a report out Wednesday from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the global consultancy.
This is pure, fabricated bullshit. Productivity growth has been astronomical over the last couple decades. I've seen it first-hand, and played a reluctant part in it. I've automated systems that meant a lot fewer people were needed for any given process in the building, and usually the overall process speeds up tremendously during implementation. That, no matter how the owner class wants to classify it, is a productivity gain. Just because they've taken all the good from that gain and consolidated it into w
We don't need more productivity (Score:2)
The current level of productivity globally and nationally is sufficient for literally everything. We're not short on gadgets, vehicles, food, housing, tools, clothes-- ANYTHING. We have enough and we can make more. The problem that needs solutions are the distribution of food, the longevity/sustainability of our semi-durable goods, and the exploitation of basic necessities like the corporate ownership of housing to force people into renting.
When people say "we need more productivity", all they're saying is
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In the Ponzi scheme of social welfare such as Social Security and Medicare, the reduction in growth rate of younger people needs to be mitigated with greater productivity if benefits are to continue as before.
could (Score:2)
Coulda woulda shoulda buddha.
The entry of many millions of unskilled laborers is not likely to lead to a productivity boom.
AI? (Score:2)
Not even reality....wait...mcKinsey...explains it (Score:2)
Points mentioned in TFA:
"...are evidence of stronger global demand..."
"...Many countries are experiencing labor shortages..."
Reality:
1 Baby boom generation are retiring in massive numbers, closing down or selling tens of thousands of highly competitive businesses in each country worldwide.
2 The new business owners will nowhere be as efficient as the retiring baby boomer owner
3 The closed businesses will reduce competition and cause prices to rise overall
4 The younger workers born after 1985 will be less pro
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See Chart 16 in The Distribution of Income and Fiscal Incidence by Age and Gender: Some Evidence from New Zealand Aziz, Omar; Gemmell, Norman; Laws, Athene.
https://ir.wgtn.ac.nz/handle/1... [wgtn.ac.nz]
50% of the population is a net drain on tax payments (they get a government subsidy) from birth to 44 years and then pay just above 0 net taxes for 15 years before becoming a net drain on tax payments. They pay just above 0 taxes for 15 years
The other 50% of the population is net positive tax payer from age 25 to 65 (40
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The other 50% of the population is net positive tax payer from age 25 to 65 (40 years) and subsidizes the other 50%.
The world's most powerful military isn't free. Aircraft carriers alone cost tax payers billions.
Rather than being a counter to your argument, I'm saying the disparity is even worse. As someone in the upper middle class, I pay a lot of taxes and I directly get very little in return. I mostly get an indirect benefit like military defense, a legal system, industry regulation, infrastructure, first responders, disaster relief, a fairly literate lower class, etc.
Oh well. I guess that's what happens when I agree
Re:Not even reality....wait...mcKinsey...explains (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the most relevant part of this is right at the top, number 1: Boomer retire. And when you look at the age pyramid, this is a really, really big issue. Not so much that the next generations are less "qualified" or "willing to work" or any such bullshit. It's simply that they are way, way smaller.
Looking at the age pyramids of the "West", what we can observe is that starting about now, more people retire than join the workforce. That's a new phenomenon. Normally, one would expect that, given that people die generally more likely as they are older, more people join than retire. And until recently, that's how it was. But we have arrived at the point where for every 10 people who retire, only 8 people join the workforce. We lose 20% of a year's workforce every year. And this will not change until about 2035 to 2040. Even then, it will only even out. It will not recover.
We are going to lose about 15-20% of our workforce within the next 15-20 years.
Now add that the "new generations" are not as easily bribable and susceptible to blackmail, simply because you can't take anything from someone who has nothing. I, a member of GenX, was maybe among the last one who were. We were the last ones to get affordable mortgages for affordable housing. With Basel III now basically disallowing lending money to anyone who actually needs it and an insanely inflated housing market, anyone younger has long realized that the idea of owning their own home is an unrealistic dream unless they're willing to spend the next 40 trying to patch the hovel up. And most of them went with "why bother?"
So they don't have a house and also no mortgage. How do you want to blackmail them into keeping the nose on the grindstone? They have no mortgage breathing down their neck, they have no relevant expenses and if they get thrown out of their flat because they can't afford it anymore, they pack their shit into a box because they don't own any more physical property and crash on the couch of a friend, just like that friend did the last 6 months when it was the other way around.
THIS is the problem we're heading into with our economy. The new generations are not "lazy". They just can't be browbeat into compliance because we didn't let them have anything we could now blackmail them with.
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Looking at the age pyramids of the "West", what we can observe is that starting about now, more people retire than join the workforce. That's a new phenomenon. Normally, one would expect that, given that people die generally more likely as they are older, more people join than retire. And until recently, that's how it was. But we have arrived at the point where for every 10 people who retire, only 8 people join the workforce. We lose 20% of a year's workforce every year. And this will not change until about 2035 to 2040. Even then, it will only even out. It will not recover.
It doesnt seem like you're accounting for immigration. Here in the US our Department of Labor predicts that the raw number of working people in the US will continue to increase for at least the next decade https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... [bls.gov] . This growth is being driven entirely by the immigration of working age people as we're well below replacement level births for our native born population.
Now if somehow all of a sudden all of Latin America suddenly gets its act together and provides both greater stabili
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Alternatively we might just get the dimwit back into office and shut down immigration. Because, you know, that's what the country needs.
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That's a good point. If he actually delivers on something like that though he'll have all the farmers and other industries in this country that rely on immigrant labor up in arms and those types of low wage industries are major parts of the economies of red states. While Trump doesnt even pretend to represent the blue half of the country he's typically fairly responsive to red state wants, especially when it's the wealthy, business owning constituents complaining.
This is one of the things that have always s
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I don't get conservative politics anyway. They pretend to be against immigration, and at the same time their biggest donators are dependent on cheap, disposable labor. They pretend to be against affordable healthcare, but the people who complain the loudest about it are also the ones that cannot afford it any other way and would actually be the ones benefitting from it. And they complain about abortions, and at the same time religious communities have the highest number of unwanted teen pregnancies.
Talk abo
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Ha, tell me about it.
Re: Not even reality....wait...mcKinsey...explains (Score:2)
They want slaves. People they can treat like shit that can not go to police because they would be arrested
Re:Oh it is (Score:4, Insightful)
Automation is a labor multiplier and we've been reaping the benefits of this for hundreds of years. Thanks to farm tractors we've gone from the majority of the population working as manual laborers in the fields to the majority of people in light duty service jobs and professionals.
Sadly those who own the robots are the ones who benefit the most. I seem to recall something about owning the means of production, but my American public education didn't seem to cover that subject.
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The problem is that this time, the displaced workers can't just go into a new industry. Also, please don't forget that with every leap in productivity and automation, the low-tier end of labor was eliminated.
Back when agriculture was labor intensive, most of this labor didn't require any kind of special knowledge or skill. It was something you could employ the least qualified and qualifiable people for. Everyone could be employed and be considered useful. When these people moved into the cities to the emerg
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Technically correct, but it's kinda hard to eliminate the dumb portion of the population. We tried, but eventually the virus turned out to be not lethal enough.
Well, maybe more luck next time.
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Sadly those who own the robots are the ones who benefit the most. I seem to recall something about owning the means of production, but my American public education didn't seem to cover that subject.
With 70+ years of examples of how collective economies work, are you seriously arguing for Marxism?
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Most of Marx's observations aren't wrong. We do have a class system that benefits landlords, bankers, and capitalists more than it benefits laborers. With us professional and middle class somewhere in the middle, left to pick a side. But it's probably not a two horse race, and even the successful examples of communism in Asia are wildly different from each other.
So the capitalist system isn't "fair" (for some definition of fair). Great. I think we all knew that. Then is the argument about "is communism is b
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In the eternal words of a German comedian: Consultants are a lot like eunuchs. They know how it's done...