> The alternate, potentially more honest, statement should be that productivity hasn't increased at the same rate as it did in the past.
The more honest statement is that productivity always grows going into a recession and falls going out of one. This is a known pattern[1] emerging from the marginal response of firms: the least productive workers, on a profit per hour basis, are laid off first. And the last to be rehired. So in a recession, average productivity goes up alongside unemployment. And as hiring ramps up out of a recession, the opposite happens.
Unfortunately, the COVID recession was partially imposed on the economy, and so whatever natural cadence the business cycle possesses is overlapping with the next recession. So in a few months we'll likely see stories about productivity increasing again.
edit: I just want to make a point that low productivity doesn't mean bad. Bad productivity is _negative_. Low productivity is just much closer to the "hurdle rate" that capitalists use to determine whether to fund projects, making the jobs riskier than the typical 30% margin SaaS products the HN crowd is most familiar with.
This was extremely true during the initial wave of covid too: productivity shot up a TON, because the people who were laid off were in inherently low productivity sectors like restaurants, theme parks, etc.
And now these restaurants, theme parks, movie theatres, literally everyone with a low-skill, low-margin business are all finding out that maybe a society shouldn't use "productivity" to judge the worth of people.
As the countless number of stores closed entirely or with massively reduced opening hours shows, societies that over-pay for bullshit jobs (=investment bankers, C-level executives, ...) and under-pay workers who do actual work in gruesome conditions don't do well either once workers realize the power is with them.
The Labor Theory of Value is true: value is created when human labor is applied to raw materials. Just because the Marxists adopted the idea doesn't make it wrong. They were wrong about other things.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo both believed in the labor theory of value.
> The Labor Theory of Value is true: value is created when human labor is applied to raw materials.
Wrong, value is created subjectively, by other people desiring the products of that labor. If nobody wants what the laborers created, then their labor had no value.
Roll a rock up and down a hill all day. You'll work hard as hell but you'll create no value. Anybody who denies the subjective theory of value is out to lunch.
I agree that value is subjective, but value is still created by labor.
Sit and stare at a rock and you have created no new value.
Labor can also destroy value, for example when a building is destroyed in a riot, or when a rock is pushed up a hill to a location that makes it less valuable.
The more honest statement is that productivity always grows going into a recession and falls going out of one. This is a known pattern[1] emerging from the marginal response of firms: the least productive workers, on a profit per hour basis, are laid off first. And the last to be rehired. So in a recession, average productivity goes up alongside unemployment. And as hiring ramps up out of a recession, the opposite happens.
Unfortunately, the COVID recession was partially imposed on the economy, and so whatever natural cadence the business cycle possesses is overlapping with the next recession. So in a few months we'll likely see stories about productivity increasing again.
edit: I just want to make a point that low productivity doesn't mean bad. Bad productivity is _negative_. Low productivity is just much closer to the "hurdle rate" that capitalists use to determine whether to fund projects, making the jobs riskier than the typical 30% margin SaaS products the HN crowd is most familiar with.
[1]: http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/research/e... (the first citation i could find, not nessecarily the best)