Discussion
The Productivity Paradox: Why Technology Makes the Economy More Efficient But Most People No Richer
creddit: > Consumer spending as a share of US GDP moved from roughly 61% in 1980 to about 68% today. That’s a modest rise over four decades — and it has essentially plateaued since 2010.> This matters because it tells us something important: technology is not meaningfully expanding the total amount humans consume. It’s redistributing how we consume, and who profits from it.This is mathematically illiterate and appears to be central to the point.
applfanboysbgon: Looks LLM-generated. Was already disinclined to read it based on hatred for that style of writing alone, but it is also just extremely vapid as far as I got before giving up at this line:> Technology redistributes the existing pie. It doesn’t reliably grow it.Technology is the reason there are 8 billion humans on this planet. It is the reason that you can pick from hundreds of different foods at the supermarket. It is the reason everyone can buy cute or cool clothes and 10 pairs of shoes. It is the reason why everyone can have a machine that cools their food, three machines that heat their food, a machine that washes their clothes, and a machine that performs billions~trillions of calculations per second to do magic. It is the reason a significant portion of the labor force in technologically-developed countries does work that involves standing around and talking to people or sitting at a desk instead of working their asses in the fields.Maybe the article gets into making some point about wealth distribution later, but it is before then making factually incorrect statements about technology so any conclusions based on that are probably faulty anyways.
prakhar897: The article has grand total of 27 em dashes.
harshakcheruku: Author here. Happy to answer questions or discuss the data sources. The labor share shift is the part I found most surprising when I dug into the BLS numbers.
wood_spirit: Does this apply to the 17 and 1800s too? Or was there an inflexion point when consumption plateaued and technology is about carving it up not increasing it? And how does it apply to other counties?My hunch is that this is a recent half century thing for the US and other countries are still earlier in the curve with lots of room to grow still
titzer: In short, it's the oligarchy.
ricksunny: Haven't opened the article yet, but surprised the comments so far are generally in the framework of "oh, economy produces more X, but too much more of a proportion of X is going to [the fortunate few] and too little to [the unfortunate many]." where is X is some kind of fungible consumable. Rather what I see are asset holders and liabilities holders (same spectrum, some enjoy the positive side, some struggle on the negative side). Goods (the consumable, fungible sort) flow in, around, between, and all throughout them. But the only ledger that matters, the one that makes some stressed out and others feel empowered & satisfied, is the asset-liability spectrum.
asmor: There is a point where the increase in diversity of products is not real economic growth, it's compensating for lack of demand. We even invented the entire discipline of marketing to manufacture demand so the line can keep going up.Is it nice we all can have cheap technology and knowledge-based jobs? Sure, to the point where you don't squeeze basic living necessities like housing or alienate me so hard from my cozy job that i literally don't give a shit (which is really unhealthy in a society that keeps telling us to define our worth based on our work output). I think we're well past that point.
measurablefunc: The entire site is AI slop. Just flag it & move on.
why_only_15: Why did you post an AI generated article (against HN rules)? https://www.pangram.com/history/0943da35-d51a-4d81-8207-fae7...
why_only_15: This seems like a really poorly thought out article. You should take more care on making sure your understanding is correct before publishing in the future.Taking the Amazon example in Part 2:For e-books (simpler), Amazon gets 30% for running the store, doing advertising, etc. and then authors get 70% [1].For print books, I'm a little less clear but it appears Amazon buys the books for roughly 50% of list[2] which for Hachette in 2025 is $26.50 so Amazon pays $13.25 to the publisher and then Amazon retails the book for $14.84. So for $100 of books sold on Amazon, $89 goes to the publisher and $11 goes to Amazon. It appears that the cost to produce these books is maybe $2/book (though I'm very unsure on this, this is a guesstimate from public data) and then the rest flows back to authors, advances, etc.Amazon.com (not AWS) has a 7% profit margin in North America (FY25), so of that $11 they get in revenue they get $0.77 in operating profit.Ok and this also annoyed me: you say $1.7T/y is $10.5k/worker, which is accurate. but then you say for the average household it's $26k/y. This is not true. There are 134m households in the US [3] so it's $12.6k/y for the average household. Maybe you meant something else like the median household but it seems more likely you just said ~2.6 people/household and multiplied the number of people/household by cost/worker. This is obviously wrong and you should have caught errors like that earlier.[1]: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210 [2]: https://www.readersfirst.org/publisher-price-watch [3]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TTLHH
cicko: Not sure your argument stands. The same technology exists today, yet one can't get Russian gas or oil out of the Gulf. Technology is not everything.
applfanboysbgon: I didn't say it was "everything", nor do I have any fucking clue what you're talking about with Russian gas, so I have literally no idea what argument you're even responding to. The article claims that technology does not lead to growth in human production or consumption:> technology is not meaningfully expanding the total amount humans consumeThis is clearly, unequivocally false, considering we went from a population of 1.5 billion people to 8 billion people off of advances in farming technology, over a span of barely 100 years. It makes the stupid claim "There are real biological and physical reasons for this ceiling. You can only eat so much.", while missing the fact that 8 billion humans, do, in fact, eat more than 1.5 billion, and we achieve producing a mind-boggling amount of food without 90% of the population being farmers to boot, thanks to technology.Same with this:> Consumer spending as a share of US GDP moved from roughly 61% in 1980 to about 68% todayWhat the fuck does this even mean? US GDP, as imperfect as a measure as it is, went from $3 trillion ($12t adjusted for inflation) in 1980 to $27 trillion in 2025. In other words, the estimate of human productivity in the US has doubled in that timespan. Does the LLM that spat this out expect the percentage of consumer spending to double from 61% to 122%? It's a fucking percentage, even if it remained the same 61% of 27 trillion is more than double 61% of 12 trillion.I deeply regret the time I wasted reading this mind-numbingly stupid article that was generated in 3 seconds, the time I spent bothering to point out how stupid it is, and the time I spent trying to parse your incoherent reply that seems to be a complete non-sequitur to anything the article or I said.
