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Dear God, the stupidity

But if you look at productivity statistics, you see that it has fallen, almost catastrophically, across the board in the last decade. There is no story about automation that’s consistent with output per hour falling precipitously. It’s literally the reverse of what you would expect.

That links to this.

Where it is stated that productivity is growing more slowly than it used to. But not that produxctivity is actually falling.

Acceleration and velocity are not the same thing.

8 thoughts on “Dear God, the stupidity”

  1. Does this ‘fall’ coincide with a fall in the unemployment rate?

    Anyway, no-one could be this stupid. They are lying.

  2. “the relative merits of a universal basic income versus a federal job guarantee”

    Looks like the Democratic Party is moving sharply to the left. Normally that wouldn’t bode well for their electoral prospects; but the USA has changed a lot.

  3. As automation takes over manufacturing the non-automatable services become a larger share of employment – 80% in the UK allegedly – so the impact of automation on increases in productivity shrinks.
    But that is obviously too difficult for Senator Warren to understand.

  4. john77: You are assuming that it’s possible to robot-assemble cars but not possible to robot-advise investors or robot-diagnose diseases. This is not an (immutable) assumption but an engineering problem to be solved, and already beginning to be solved. (Of course, all monies flowing to a human employee, by government mandate, in excess of the actual value of his work, is money ready to flow to whomever solves these engineering problems.)

  5. @ Spike
    One of my friends works for “Nutmeg” which is trying to use technology to make advice for investors more efficient and cheaper. So I do know that people are working towards this – I also know that progress is agonisingly slow. It is possible but it hasn’t happened yet to any significant extent.
    My hairdresser has also made use of automation and precision machinery, but my haircut actually takes longer now than it did when I was a schoolboy.

  6. my haircut actually takes longer now than it did when I was a schoolboy

    is that because you have more hair now, John? 🙂

  7. Automation

    Laser eye surgery is automated, but still damned expensive.

    Ophthalmologist closed shop the reason? However, don’t trust Joe Pikey to control the eye robot.

    Solution?

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