[point_blank]

> Productivity has fallen

The alternate, potentially more honest, statement should be that productivity hasn't increased at the same rate as it did in the past. I'm not the only employee who has realized that working harder year after year isn't physically or psychologically sustainable, and is rarely (if ever) rewarded.

Someone is angry we're not working hard enough.

[jldugger]

> The alternate, potentially more honest, statement should be that productivity hasn't increased at the same rate as it did in the past.

The more honest statement is that productivity always grows going into a recession and falls going out of one. This is a known pattern[1] emerging from the marginal response of firms: the least productive workers, on a profit per hour basis, are laid off first. And the last to be rehired. So in a recession, average productivity goes up alongside unemployment. And as hiring ramps up out of a recession, the opposite happens.

Unfortunately, the COVID recession was partially imposed on the economy, and so whatever natural cadence the business cycle possesses is overlapping with the next recession. So in a few months we'll likely see stories about productivity increasing again.

edit: I just want to make a point that low productivity doesn't mean bad. Bad productivity is _negative_. Low productivity is just much closer to the "hurdle rate" that capitalists use to determine whether to fund projects, making the jobs riskier than the typical 30% margin SaaS products the HN crowd is most familiar with.

[1]: http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/research/e... (the first citation i could find, not nessecarily the best)

[xxpor]

This was extremely true during the initial wave of covid too: productivity shot up a TON, because the people who were laid off were in inherently low productivity sectors like restaurants, theme parks, etc.

[mschuster91]

And now these restaurants, theme parks, movie theatres, literally everyone with a low-skill, low-margin business are all finding out that maybe a society shouldn't use "productivity" to judge the worth of people.

[WalterBright]

This is another formulation of the Labor Theory of Value, which has been discredited time and again. Societies based on the LToV have not done well.

[mschuster91]

> Societies based on the LToV have not done well.

As the countless number of stores closed entirely or with massively reduced opening hours shows, societies that over-pay for bullshit jobs (=investment bankers, C-level executives, ...) and under-pay workers who do actual work in gruesome conditions don't do well either once workers realize the power is with them.

[recursivedoubts]

The Labor Theory of Value is true: value is created when human labor is applied to raw materials. Just because the Marxists adopted the idea doesn't make it wrong. They were wrong about other things.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo both believed in the labor theory of value.

[MichaelCollins]

> The Labor Theory of Value is true: value is created when human labor is applied to raw materials.

Wrong, value is created subjectively, by other people desiring the products of that labor. If nobody wants what the laborers created, then their labor had no value.

Roll a rock up and down a hill all day. You'll work hard as hell but you'll create no value. Anybody who denies the subjective theory of value is out to lunch.

[WalterBright]

> Adam Smith and David Ricardo both believed in the labor theory of value.

Everybody makes misteaks.

[mysterydip]

Remember when computers and automation promosed to give us all this free time? Turns out it just meant companies could pay one person to do the job of four.

[pbourke]

Another formulation is that technology augments the impact that a single individual can have. The productivity gains allowed by silicon are the greatest single economic advance in human history. Businesses become increasingly more productive to the degree that they are founded on, or can reorganize themselves to be in alignment with, this trajectory.

I say this while sipping my morning coffee, browsing HN and waiting for an amount of computation to finish on a single machine that required either a supercomputer or multi-million dollar cluster 20 years ago.

[aksss]

Well, TBF it gave three people more free time. Oh, you were expecting compensated free time??

[antonf]

Isn’t it what economists would call a 4x increase in productivity? Isn’t fall in productivity mean that you now need more people to do same job?

[shams93]

exactly!!!

[shams93]

We're hitting a ceiling based upon how many hours a single human can work without dropping dead from sleep deprivation, when you talk about 90 hours a week that means living at the office, over 90 hours a week and you're looking at only 90 minutes of rest per night 7 days a week.

[beckingz]

7 days * 24 hours = 168 hours per week. 90/168 is only 53% of the total hours in a week, and leaves 78 hours for non-work, or 11 hours per day.

Which is an insane amount of time and probably does not actually increase productivity. The math does not check out as you claimed though.

[MichaelCollins]

We blew past the natural limit many many years ago, except the limit was artificially raised by the normalization of performance enhancing drugs (namely tea, coffee, etc.)

[FredPret]

I’ve grown more disillusioned with employment over time.

Whether I knock it out of the park, or slack off, I get pretty much the same outcome. Loyalty is not rewarded - see the recent layoffs.

Now, I’m not complaining, I just think maybe more people are waking up to the drawbacks of being an employee.

All my extra energy is now focused toward side businesses - as those start paying off, my contribution to GDP is likely to go way up.

[fsckboy]

> and is rarely (if ever) rewarded

productivity growth is always rewarded, it leads to more goods at lower prices across the economy, so everybody's standard of living goes up. This is a very real effect; consider how small percentages of inflation cause pain throughout the economy, the same pain is produced through productivity drops.

[jgust]

There is the impression that this is no longer true - capital owners are capturing the increased productivity as profit and "everybody's standard of living" is remaining the same or eroding.

[Moissanite]

"Past performance may not be indicative of future results. The value of your economic model as a predictor of outcomes may go down as well as up."