No growth in productivity, is there really?
Economists and writers discuss the point that there is no growth in productivity.
One can think this is true because with processes based on modern technology/services we are replacing only certain steps of processes. While these steps are more convenient and easy to use, they don’t take a big portion of time of the entire process.
For example, classical taxi vs Uber.
What Uber optimized is searching for a car as well as payment steps.
Previously, I would call a taxi service to get a car. In the end of the trip, I would pay by cash.
Now we use the app to request a car and the payment happens semi-automatically after the ride ends.
The search for a car and payment for the ride don’t take so much time relative to the time of the entire trip, so the improvement in time doesn’t affect it drastically.
Now we can also see on a map where the car is, rating of the driver, but all these features are not increasing productivity, rather mainly comfort and security (which is btw also good).
At the same time, the competition has increased and this impacted the prices for the benefit of the consumers, but it didn’t impact the productivity anyway.
HOWEVER:
1. the productivity is the amount of work done over time
2. there is work done for more security for the passenger and payment
3. there is work done to provide more convenience and control for the ride
Since the amount of work done, although maybe indirectly, has grown, the productivity has also grown, even though from the time perspective it hasn’t much.
Next question:
There is also a big discussion about why productivity in using computers for work stagnated.
In my opinion, it’s a similar story. Convenience and security have been improved, there are less manual errors and as a bonus there is now a convenient way to transfer information to another party.
Inspiration:
