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by mike_hearn
688 days ago
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Computers having little impact is true if you look at productivity graphs, but a lot of economists aren't sure that can really be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox If computers really had little impact on productivity then things like the Cloudstrike outage would be barely noticed, instead of causing instant mass disruption worldwide due to sudden productivity loss. It would also imply that everyone, everywhere, in every industry, is an idiot who adopted computers despite not getting much return. That isn't plausible, so it's more likely that there's a problem with data. In particular, note that productivity growth of 1% is compounding. Each year you need bigger and bigger upgrades to sustain that 1% growth. |
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That is a massive amount of content and products you consume today that just aren't accurately valued by GDP, and thus not captured by productivity measurements. The companies providing those services makes money in other ways, sure, but that value isn't even close to the amount of money it would have costed to buy that much products for consumers in the old economy.
Just take the amount of porn consumed by the average teenager today, that would have costed a fortune 30 years ago while today he got it for free.