The recent jump in US productivity comes after a massive fiscal stimulus centred on green industry
And the way they do it is by creating jobs in an industry that’s important for our all future.
Others have explained why “productivity” is not the one and all messurement on how well a country /Europe does, but that Europe desperately needs to put money into their hands to get jobs in the green industry going, especially Germany, is definitely true. The Biden government made a huge effort creating these jobs, the question is if it isn’t just going down hill from here with that after the next election.
Everyone should. If we’re not competitive, we become dependent on them. You know, the same thing that happened with Russia and we’re now desperately trying to fix it.
But if we’re competitive then the only way is up, you then NEED growth.
But that’s just NOT possible.
You CAN’T have infinite growth. That’s not a thing.
So either you can run after the “cool” kids that are chasing something that’s unreachable, or you can come to terms and settle with “good enough” (the later has the benefit of not destroying the planet in the process)
you can come to terms and settle with “good enough”
Exactly. My neighbour went shopping today. I will have to go tomorrow, but why should my goal be to bring home more groceries than her?
The economy is a tool to supply people with stuff. But it’s not a competition. If I have enough food I don’t need more. Enough is good enough for me, regardless if my neighbour bought more. Or less.
“Productivity” is how much a worker produces in an hour. Lower productivity means either that a people have to work longer hours, or make do with less. So, who cares? Pretty much everyone.
the difference between supply and demand is really so low that any dip in ‘productivity’ would harm anything more than an executive’s RoI.
that the threat of this financial ‘harm’ necessitates more work.
with the increase in ‘productivity’ over the last century, if we reduced our expectations, and stopped letting monopoly money run our entire society, and stopped burning surplus resources because it’s ‘unsold’ or would drive down prices: we wouldn’t need to work even 20% what is expected of us now.
Exactly. This neo-liberal drive to constantly grow grow grow is insanity. China produces a lot of low quality shit that goes straight into landfills, simply for the sake of producing. Productivity means nothing.
Yes and no. Productivity is not measured in physical output. It’s measured in how much money people pay, which has problems, of course. If it really goes straight to the landfill, then nothing has been produced. Countries may pay for that sort of thing with taxes to create jobs, but that’s not a neoliberal thing at all.
Eventually, the only reasonable way to measure productivity is in terms of what people want. That’s what you do when you look at what people pay for something. Any other way would also have problems.
Failure to consider environmental degradation and resource depletion are indeed problems. Norway is a better example for this. They have a very high productivity on paper, because oil. But that basically pretends that they literally produce the oil, rather than pumping it out of the sea floor. In reality, that’s more like selling off an inheritance. And that’s not even considering the damage done when fossil fuels are burned.
Those are not the assumptions, but there are indeed a great many problems with measuring productivity.
Usually, you only count work for money. Cooking dinner at home does not go into the statistic. Ordering dinner from a restaurant does. I would say that it is a problem that the “production” of leisure time is not counted. Of course, it’s not clear how this could be reasonably done.
“Productivity” already goes some way towards addressing such problems. It is usually GDP divided by hours worked (for money). US Americans work far more hours than their European counter-parts, so that their average incomes are much higher. Whether they are actually richer, depends on the value of “free” time. “Free” in quotes because it does not include necessary work like housework or healthcare visits.
If you look at a list of countries by productivity, you will find that it more or less matches common intuitions about what the rich countries are. That’s where people want to migrate to, so it does tell you something.
The point being made is that the global economic order, as built and maintained by our world leaders and “captains of industry”, is obviously not sustainable in a variety of absolutely crucial ways. We need to find a less capitalistic and more humanist dynamic to orchestrate our society by. It’s becoming more and more clear that simply assigning dollar-value amounts to everything and then comparing them is not a good holistic strategy for managing the efforts and direction of a civilization.
Running anything means understanding the facts you are facing. Running a society means looking at statistics. You must know what they say or do not say. Someone who does not know what “productivity” means is not going to be part of the solution.
what a harmful, elitist, high technocratic, economistic, no-true-scotsman take: someone who doesn’t view the world in pure quantitative terms and understand precisely a dialect of jargon has no valuable insight?
you’re right that this character wouldn’t be part of a ‘solution’, under current conditions, because it would be formulated by a well-funded political thinktank, specialising in number-go-big policy, tacked to the end of a dredged report with absolutely no involvement from measly imperial subjects.
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