“”””But the BENEFITS from these enormously productive technologies only seem to go to the richest of the rich””””
You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average.
Total wealth is created by productivity and is then divided between labor and capital. Where labor unions are strong, more of the total wealth goes to labor, and where labor unions are weak, more of the total wealth goes to capital.
It’s the total wealth per hour that has seen slow growth in recent decades.
If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.
In the old days, an army of secretaries kept the world in order. Despite your intuitions, they did in fact have ways of quickly finding one file out of millions of files. And secretaries offered a flexibility that we’ve lost with computers.
It is the loss of flexibility that causes computers to damage productivity.
> Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.
To note, in the olden days, mistakes written in your record or misinterpretations (e.g.took the wrong record from the cabinet) would just have been a fact of life and nobody might even notice. Ms Wilson and Ms Wiston just shouldn't have been in the same hospital at the same time.
As you say everything was more flexible, more fuzzy. If you wanted the world to look orderly you'd quickly sweap under the rug the misaligned bits or disappear what you don't want there.
This is also why you use cash and paper register if you need your restaurant's finances to look pristine on paper while still racking in money that doesn't need to be accounted.
> If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.
I would argue this isn’t necessarily because of computers but a byproduct of an antiquated system and process being codified into a computer. The reason for this seems to be that there are structural inefficiencies built into our healthcare system that create a ton of added complexity that is near impossible to unwind because of legal (contractual and privacy-related) risks. For example, any attempts at improving efficiency in patient care creates potential liabilities for medical professionals. People are scared to innovate in this space, so the programs are just digital translations of an existing process. This requires a time investment to learn the “new way” of doing the same thing, and builds inherit laziness because steps are still require that should have been automated away. Medical notes are a good example of this; it’s required to be documented in an extremely specific way and of a certain length because of insurance so it just ends up being copy and pasted, free text, by the physician to meet this requirement.
You misunderstand how labor productivity is calculated. It’s simply the the total amount of wealth generated by a worker per hour. So for instance, a worker at a McDonalds restaurant generates $150 in wealth per hour, and gets paid $12 per hour on average.
Total wealth is created by productivity and is then divided between labor and capital. Where labor unions are strong, more of the total wealth goes to labor, and where labor unions are weak, more of the total wealth goes to capital.
It’s the total wealth per hour that has seen slow growth in recent decades.
If you doubt how much computers destroy productivity, then simply visit a hospital and you can see it with your own eyes. My mom was recently in the hospital so I got to see this myself. Mistake after mistake because of bad information either put into the computer, or codes being misinterpreted.
In the old days, an army of secretaries kept the world in order. Despite your intuitions, they did in fact have ways of quickly finding one file out of millions of files. And secretaries offered a flexibility that we’ve lost with computers.
It is the loss of flexibility that causes computers to damage productivity.