
Time-saving technology destroys our productivity - chesterfield
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/01/how-time-saving-technology-destroys-our-productivity/
======
mason240
>In 1929 John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2029 people in the developed
nations could enjoy a perfectly civilised standard of living while working for
16 hours a week.

This is true today if you wanted to live at the same standard of middle class
living in 1929, complete with eating only meals hand cooked from base
ingredients and no concern with the environmental effects of things like
burning coal and garbage.

~~~
hyperpape
In real dollars, US per capita income has more than quintupled since 1929.
[http://www.demographia.com/db-pc1929.pdf](http://www.demographia.com/db-
pc1929.pdf) (2016 is higher than 2008, to fill in the missing info).

So even if you want a rising standard of living, work hours could conceivably
be shorter.

That said, the fundamental point that most of us wouldn't accept 1929
lifestyles for any amount of leisure is right.

~~~
notahacker
Disproportionate growth in housing costs and the impossibility of opting for
1929 healthcare are other factors making it difficult for the average person
to afford a 1929 lifestyle on part time work in most developed countries, even
if they're happy with cycling and gramophones.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
It's also often illegal to opt for 1929 building standards. There's minimum
lot sizes, minimum apartment sizes, and other zoning standards that almost
make me believe they were deliberately designed to raise housing prices.

~~~
vacri
Historically, working- and middle-class people have spent all and almost all
of their money respectively on 'just living'. House prices are really high
now, but other things have dropped. Whatever the combination of prices, 'just
living' will always consume all of the income of the poor... unless something
truly unusual happens.

------
kogepathic
I don't agree with the title, even though it's the original from the source.

The author argues that technology has made us more productive, and as a result
we spend more of our time doing ancillary tasks (e.g. writing emails,
attending meetings) and that since this isn't directly producing value, it's
reducing productivity.

I'd argue that as the work has become more complex-- designing software is not
as easy as say manufacturing the same widget 200 times each day-- the planning
tasks (e.g. writing emails, having meetings) have grown, though perhaps not
entirely linearly.

The author also implies that people are spending more time now looking busy
and being busy, perhaps over fears that if they completed their job in 16
hours and spent the remaining 24 hours of the work week twiddling their
thumbs, they would be fired.

~~~
passivepinetree
I totally agree with your point about looking busy. But that just means
there's a management failure somewhere, right?

Shouldn't management recognize such an abnormally productive employee and a)
let them go home after their work is done, no matter when that is, or b) give
them more work to do (and a corresponding salary increase)?

~~~
kogepathic
> Shouldn't management recognize such an abnormally productive employee

Using what metric? This is really hard to implement in reality, especially
when the average corporate management has no idea what engineers spend their
day doing.

> b) give them more work to do

This already happens. See companies looking to hire "heros"

> and a corresponding salary increase

Hah! Yeah, maybe at your company. Mine would work you 80 hours per week for
peanuts if they could.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Oh, and in an exit interview for a layoff once:

\- He: I never see your car in the parking lot after hours. \- Me: Yeah, I've
been done with everything I was given for months now.

Please note - it was a layoff exit interview.

------
gipp
Counter-argument: The work described here as "bullshit" \-- administration,
bureaucracy, ever-finer metrics of people and products -- actually _DO_
generate "real" value in increasing the speed at which information asymmetries
resolve themselves. E.g. people metrics actually make it _harder_ to maintain
the cocoons of bullshit the author describes, product metrics make the
disparity between what's provided and what's desired more apparent more
quickly, etc.

The proliferation of these kinds of work is not necessarily out of "filling
space," but because information technology has drastically decreased the
marginal costs of this kind of information-only work, and so lowered the
barrier of marginal utility required to justify it. So, we have information
work where the workers actually carrying it out can't perceive the value,
because it's too distributed and too many layers removed from the individual,
but it's there. The apparent lack of productivity increase is because those
metrics, too, are flawed and do not account for these kinds of value.

Now, the question of whether that work is then _worthwhile_ at a societal
level is entirely different.

~~~
zaroth
Your argument boils down to 'the productivity metrics are broken'. But since I
think we're talking about GDP basically, I doubt you're right.

TFA argues that productivity is squandered by Office Space style ass-covering
wastes of time. But I think even good intentioned beaurocratic nonsense can
still account for the strong headwind against productivity.

Take a look at the great improvements in supply chain management and JIT
manufacturing techniques for true process improvements which result in
measurable productivity rise. Kanban works there in ways it simply does not
for software, for example.

~~~
Bartweiss
Similarly, "good" overhead like A/B testing can suck up an enormous amount of
time without producing anything useful. Badly-executed A/B tests are an easy
way to show single-digit "gains" over and over again without ever producing
actual movement, and since executing them well is genuinely difficult there
are a lot of companies which are running frantically on a treadmill.

There's a lot of business 'motion' that's fundamentally a mismatch between
something looking good at an individual level, and achieving nothing on a
corporate or national scale.

------
paulsutter
A really good example is Microsoft Outlook.

Features like auto-complete make it a breeze to invite 8 people to a meeting.
You can burn up 16 person-hours of time with a few keystrokes (assuming these
are actual productive people like developers, whose schedules are impacted by
more than the duration of the meeting).

------
musesum
> Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman of Ogilvy Group UK

I wonder if the OP observations of "(box-ticking, arse-covering, fatuous self-
exculpating emails, the collection of ever more stupid metrics)" occurs more
often in the advertising business? I searched for a chart that broke down
stupid metrics by industry, but the closest one I could find is this:
[http://www.infosecisland.com/uploads/remoteimg/aa043ae12a097...](http://www.infosecisland.com/uploads/remoteimg/aa043ae12a09714b10a9f400d16aba67.jpg)

~~~
Bartweiss
I mean, advertising is a bit infamous for this. Outside of immediate-action
advertising ("Want to buy this?" and "Click here"), it's very hard to prove
the effects of a given program.

Sales boosters like coupons are already tricky - did they create new buyers,
reengage existing buyers, or do customers just hold off on buying until
there's a discount? And brand awareness ads are even harder - did your Toyota
add two years ago drive a sale today? You can't even survey for that, since in
theory it works on people who don't remember it consciously.

So I have a dark suspicion that advertising is more full of stupid metrics
than most roles, simply because real analytics are harder to produce.

~~~
gertef
The most important problem with advertising is that it is competive waste:

If firms A and B can create a product a cost $X that sells for $X+$Y firm B
can create the same product for $X, then A and B will waste $Y on advertising
in an attempt to win consumers for each other, for no benefit to anyone
(except in any artistic/entertainment value in the advertising, and the
possibly useful wealth-redistribution from firm's owners to advertising
employees).

~~~
deodorel
I remember reading an article on marginal revolution about how wasteful are
charities: The paying customers are scarce and the competition is so fierce
that a big sum of the money you donate goes on advertising to gain new donors.
In the worst cases most of the money goes into that ...

~~~
Bartweiss
This is definitely a huge problem, especially with socially-competitive
charities. Things like breast cancer awareness and helping the local needy
around Christmas are so popular that they're locked into ugly advertising
struggles. And if people don't do their homework, the most efficient
fundraiser will be the charity that spends _no_ money on the cause (or just
enough to stay exempt).

This seems like a good time to plug Givewelll. Their entire goal is
quantifying the good done by charities and promoting the most efficient. They
compare globally, but even if you want to give to something specific like
animal welfare or local homelessness, they have some good efficiency tips.

[http://www.givewell.org/](http://www.givewell.org/)

------
Old_Thrashbarg
The author's theory is completely unsubstantiated. They make a surprising
conjecture and instead of proving, asks the audience to disprove it:

"I defy anyone who has worked in an office over the last 25 years to write and
say that my theory does not fit the observable facts"

Seems a bit lazy.

~~~
galdosdi
Well, have you?

~~~
__jal
Not the OP, but... that's not how it works. (a) It is the responsibility of
the person making an assertion to back it up. If you disagree, god says you
need to give me all your money. (b) The proposed test (compare with 25 years
ago) is worse than useless, for the same reason people, as they age, tend to
think the Kids These Days are lazier/ruder/dumber/more helpless/whatever than
Back In My Day. It is designed to solicit agreement with the writer, not
actually demonstrate the validity of anything.

------
nine_k
The money quote:

«Keynes was partly right, and many people today _are_ working a 16-hour week.
By which I mean that they spend 16 hours each week engaged in activities which
create some useful form of economic value. The other 20+ hours in the office
are spent supporting the monstrous extra informational, bureaucratic and
administrative burden made possible by new technology.»

Is the bureaucracy in your company so huge? Are engineers in a startup, where
bureaucracy is close to zero, several times as productive as in a large
company? Are any commercial companies shrewd enough to kill most of internal
bureaucracy and crush the competition? Are there any numbers to support this?

~~~
edblarney
This 'lower work week thing' misses the point of social dynamics.

Yes, we could call work '16 hour weeks' and maintain a 1940's standard of
living. But to make progress, we need 40 hour weeks.

At least for the time being, we've come to resonate around 40 hours as being
'how long someone should work' \- and so we will work those kinds of hours.

Sure - we could all work less hours, but it would mean another kind of social
contract.

You can see this in Europe vs. USA vs. Asian attitudes.

And yes, 'more hours' generally does mean less productivity per hour, but you
still get more output.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
If income distribution still worked the way it did in the mid 20th century,
most people wouldn't need to work 40 hours a week for the paltry income they
receive today.

~~~
nine_k
How, in your eyes, the income distribution has changed?

~~~
madgar
Did you seriously just ask a stranger on HN to explain one of the biggest
sociopolitical issues of the last 10 years?

Here's an introduction: the GI Bill sent 2 million men to college for free
from 1945-1955. In 2017, by contrast, the US has $2 trillion in outstanding
student loan debt.

~~~
edblarney
That's comparing Apples to Oranges. More like Apples to Cars.

The US spends more as a % of it's GDP and more $/capita than any nation on
earth on higher education - and sends a considerably larger share of it's
population to college than most other nations, certainly any European nations
where college is free.

The % of young people going to college has increased dramatically from 1950 to
2016.

And FYI - if you join the Army today, you can still get your education
subsidized :)

'Raw' dollars debt doesn't help us understand the picture that much, moreover,
if everyone in America started going advanced degrees, that would also
increase student debt, but that would be a good thing, no?

Americans are on the whole much wealthier, and the opportunity that young
people have today vis-a-vis 1950 is so much that it's basically unthinkable
back in the 1950's.

That said, it's not so good for working class people without jobs, and little
job stability.

------
aschearer
Taking the idea that most "work" done at work is a waste of time, doesn't that
suggest there's a big opportunity for an enlightened competitor to eat an
established company's lunch? You could do the same amount of productive work
for a fraction of the cost . . .

Is this type of thing happening and not widely reported? Is it an under
explored opportunity waiting to be tapped? Or is there something else going on
that leads the inefficient model to win in the long run?

~~~
ikeboy
Startups

~~~
xyzzy4
Startup employees do just as much bullshit to make it seem like they're busy.
Their main incentive is to keep their job, not make the company successful.

~~~
nine_k
Startup employees are partly paid in stock, so they do have incentives to make
the company successful. At the very least they want the company to break even
before the runway money end, else the payroll will stop rolling.

~~~
Bartweiss
I did some startup (and pseudo-startup) work in college, when I wasn't getting
any stock.

From personal experience, it's still motivational to wonder whether your next
paycheck is coming out. Not always _pleasant_ , but it was a great incentive
to push back against busywork and time-wasting management even if the
reception was bad. "We might go bankrupt" really shifts the balance on "how
much should I invest in fighting for good decisions?"

------
stephenmm
I could retire today and be very comfortable for the remainder of my days (I
am 41) but man would life get boring. Even if I work on projects I haven't had
time for and travelled to places I wanted to go there is still something about
working day in and day out, with a sense of urgency and with a group of people
to make something greater than you could do on your own that leads to a sense
of purpose. I also think that if you are spending that much time covering your
arse you are working for the wrong company. You should revel in doing quality
work not in covering your arse.

~~~
collyw
I wish i was in the same position as you. Sounds like a lack of imagination to
me.

------
banku_brougham
>... fatuous self-exculpating emails

I think the author is on point, but i sense the article will be a litmus test
of reader's perception of what Harvard Business School calls 'bullshit' in
modern business.

------
xg15
> _Why has IT contributed so little to productivity? To understand this, it
> might help to understand that people in any organisation have two
> motivations. One is to create genuine economic value; the other is to
> generate a protective carapace of bullshit to protect their continued
> employment._

TL;DR - If automation could save work, but people are dependant on work to
survive then automation will not actually save work. Who'd have known.

------
fnordsensei
> Robert Solow’s famous observation that ‘you can see the computer age
> everywhere but in the productivity statistics’.

Does anyone know what this observation is based on? GDP per capita adjusted
for inflation has been rising for at least the last hundred years.

~~~
mark_edward
Productivity growth has not recovered from the last crisis very well, well,
basically everywhere

Found a primer (Google link in case paywall)
[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=/amp/s/...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/a82be370-23f9-11e6-9d4d-c11776a5124d&ved=0ahUKEwjI_u3B6r7RAhVF6oMKHY2tC5kQFggfMAA&usg=AFQjCNHsz2TTVDGkrIxImsEKGK4bfmBR_w&sig2=TBuqf6TtHBL9rqswP23WoQ)

