Biggest decline in US productivity in 74 years

What is driving extended inflation is income going up in expectation of future inflation.

Too many dollars being made, people unable and/or unwilling to work, and collapsing supply chains partly caused by the calamity of Ukraine all are bigger drivers.

This is about chaos, this is about America no longer working....in collapse.
 
If this is Economics 101 you’re the first person I’ve seen say these back to back quarters of productivity falling is a good thing.

Usually when there is growth, at first there is productivity falls. Usually when we enter a recession, there will be a productivity gain about midway through when the layoffs start.
 
Too many dollars being made, people unable and/or unwilling to work, and collapsing supply chains partly caused by the calamity of Ukraine all are bigger drivers.

This is about chaos, this is about America no longer working....in collapse.

Lazy people not working would bump up productivity. Lazy people being forced to work would lower productivity. Lazy people are not good for productivity, so having them not count drives up productivity.

Supply chain problems, due to pandemic or Ukraine, could actually lower productivity. Imagine you have a car factory that is not getting computer chips, or some other essential part. You will try to make cars, but you will not be producing shippable cars.
 
It costs a lot of money to build a new factory, and to train people, but it does not produce anything immediately, and takes time to raise productivity. The same is true for hiring new people. It takes time to train them, and get them up to peak productivity, so new employees lower average productivity.
Lowering it from what? You seem to forget there was no productivity there in the first place! Any other factory's productive remains unchanged.
Shutting down a factory, or laying people off raises average productivity.
How?? There is less productivity!
You first shutdown the least productive factories, and layoff the least productive people. That causes a upward blip in average productivity.
No, that causes LESS productivity.
Negative productivity over time is a very bad thing, and positive productivity over time is a very good thing. But under a year and the reverse is true. This is all Economics 101.
No, this is all bad math.
 
Lowering it from what? You seem to forget there was no productivity there in the first place! Any other factory's productive remains unchanged.

Average productivity goes down. If you have one factory that produces 1,000 widgets a day, and add a second factory that produces no widgets, you have an average that went from 1,000 to 500.

How?? There is less productivity!

Productivity is the amount of output for a given input. So as the input goes up, if output does not go up by the same amount, productivity goes down.

You seem to have confused productivity with amount produced (output).
 
Yes, it is a new graduate from a master's degree program. I do not want to go into too much detail, but she had no relevant job experience. She had McDonald's level jobs.

A master's degree is a post graduate degree.

So Microsoft hires another incompetent with a degree. What else is new?
 
Average productivity goes down. If you have one factory that produces 1,000 widgets a day, and add a second factory that produces no widgets, you have an average that went from 1,000 to 500.
No. The average productivity remains the same. It's still 1000.
Productivity is the amount of output for a given input.
Productivity is the amount of output...period.
Even if you use net instead of productivity, it is the same. The new factory is using no input yet either.
So as the input goes up, if output does not go up by the same amount, productivity goes down.
Why would more raw material be used for less product????!?
You seem to have confused productivity with amount produced (output).
Nah. You're just bad at math.
 
It costs a lot of money to build a new factory, and to train people, but it does not produce anything immediately, and takes time to raise productivity. The same is true for hiring new people. It takes time to train them, and get them up to peak productivity, so new employees lower average productivity.

Shutting down a factory, or laying people off raises average productivity. You first shutdown the least productive factories, and layoff the least productive people. That causes a upward blip in average productivity.

Negative productivity over time is a very bad thing, and positive productivity over time is a very good thing. But under a year and the reverse is true. This is all Economics 101.

This is completely wrong. One of the leading causes of factories and other businesses shutting down is being regulated out-of-business. The coal industry is a perfect example. Instead of being less efficient and ending operations due to competition in the market, the government has stepped in and forced their closure in favor of less productive alternatives like wind and solar.
At the same time, the government recognized that their new choices were less productive so they propped them up with huge subsidies to make them marginally cost effective. The problem there is the taxes taken to provide the subsidies make other businesses less productive because they are robbed of part of their profits. Less profit, less ability to invest and grow.
 
So Microsoft hires another incompetent with a degree. What else is new?

I believe she was very competent, I just could not be sure.

For a while there, the average house in America was being sold in 8 days. There is no way to get an inspection in that short of a time. Literally, you are stuck making an offer based on a guess. This was the same thing.

Life is like that sometimes.
 
I suspect that the Big Problem is that there are loads of well paid full of themselves ( I am going to make the world a better place, through force!) white collar corporate types who dont contribute much to the cause. I am expecting huge numbers of them to be put on the street over the next two years.

Yes, let's talk about CEO productivity! Let's test their productivity the same way- Their multi-million dollar annual salaries over number of hours worked vs. widgets sold.

I don't think companies are hurting because they are paying more for labor these days.

But, I do believe that Corporate America may be struggling because they have CEO's that are making $10,000 an hour playing carpet golf in the office instead of looking out for the best interests of their labor force or the companies they play carpet golf for!

So before any Corporation starts complaining about the cost of labor today- THEY SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO TELL US HOW MUCH THEY ARE PAYING THEIR CEO'S AND HOW THEY FEEL ABOUT THAT!

I THINK WE MAY HAVE JUST DISCOVERED THE REAL PROBLEM HERE!

THANKS!
 
No. The average productivity remains the same. It's still 1000.

No, the amount of output stays the same. The productivity is 500 per factory, because there is more inputs (factories).

Productivity is the amount of output...period.

You are just plain stupid. You are adding nothing to the debate. I am becoming dumber having to explain this to you over and over again. It really is not worth my time.
 
Yes, let's talk about CEO productivity! Let's test their productivity the same way- Their multi-million dollar annual salaries over number of hours worked vs. widgets sold.

I don't think companies are hurting because they are paying more for labor these days.

But, I do believe that Corporate America may be struggling because they have CEO's that are making $10,000 an hour playing carpet golf in the office instead of looking out for the best interests of their labor force or the companies they play carpet golf for!

So before any Corporation starts complaining about the cost of labor today- THEY SHOULD BE REQUIRED TO TELL US HOW MUCH THEY ARE PAYING THEIR CEO'S AND HOW THEY FEEL ABOUT THAT!

I THINK WE MAY HAVE JUST DISCOVERED THE REAL PROBLEM HERE!

THANKS!
Stock buybacks require no imagination and are almost risk free. CEOs lack innovation and creativity. They're not smart enough to take risks on new trends.
 
Not practical.

A quarry company, for example, doesn't build it's own mining equipment or the tires for them, or the rock crushers, or the conveyor belts, or the screens, or the motors for them. It buys that stuff.
A power company doesn't make it's own wire, it's own towers, the insulators, the service transformers, or even the power poles alongside each road. They buy all that stuff.

So what company do you know that has everything house?

Just because a company does not make its own pencils does not prevent it from keeping its business processes in house.
Microsoft I believe is a good example.
 
Stock buybacks require no imagination and are almost risk free. CEOs lack innovation and creativity. They're not smart enough to take risks on new trends.

I've worked for some good ones in smaller companies.

But, I've also worked for some who were totally useless and nothing but pure overhead.

Mentioning the stock buybacks- That is an old CEO trick. CEO's will sell off their entire stock and force the stock prices to crash- Just in time for their employees stock purchasing window to open, so they will commit to all the stocks they will be buying monthly. And after the prices crash, then the same CEO goes in and buys back those same stocks for pennies on the dollar for what they just sold them for.

That's how the CEO millionaires club makes money- Fucking the employees 401k's up!
 
If this is Economics 101 you’re the first person I’ve seen say these back to back quarters of productivity falling is a good thing.
On a surface level, you got it right. Walt seems to think that lower productivity is somehow actually higher productivity... As ITN called it, "bad math".

But to expand upon your "back to back quarters of productivity falling" statement, I just want to be clear that what you are making reference to is a GDP number. A more precise and accurate way to state your claim is that the GDP number has been negative for two consecutive quarters . Productivity in and of itself has actually been down for quite some time longer than that (ever since the 2020 COVID shutdowns that Democrats did).

Now, how can this be? I will provide you with an example to clarify:

Q1: 100 widgets produced @ $10/widget final widget value = $1,000.00 monetary value of widgets
Q2: 80 widgets produced @ $13/widget final widget value = $1,040.00 monetary value of widgets


Under this scenario, the productivity of widgets has decreased by 20%, yet due to a 30% increase in final widget value, the GDP number still ended up increasing by 4% even though productivity has actually decreased.

This is why one needs to be careful with regard to referencing GDP numbers by themselves when trying to make sense of the condition of the economy. And yes, I know that it is claimed that the GDP number "accounts for inflation", but that claim is incorrect.
 
No, the amount of output stays the same. The productivity is 500 per factory, because there is more inputs (factories).
1,000 widgets + 0 widgets = 1,000 widgets, NOT 500. Productivity remains at 1,000 widgets...

An additional factory is not an input with regard to productivity. Raw material is the input. A factory is not raw material.

You are just plain stupid. You are adding nothing to the debate. I am becoming dumber having to explain this to you over and over again. It really is not worth my time.
This is your issue, not his. You suck at math.
 
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Did shutting down the economy (covid lockdowns) "raise average productivity"?

Covid was so beyond our experience that we have no clue what it all means. The economic numbers are all messed up, because they are based on extrapolation from a smaller amount of data, but no one knows whether that extrapolation is correct anymore... Actually, we know it is off, because numbers that are supposed to be close are far apart. We just do not know how they are off.

Workplaces were shutdown because of how essential they were, not on how productive they were. Some people were sent home, and so not counted against productivity numbers, but other were sent home, and paid, so were counted against productivity numbers. Social distancing meant a lot of production went much slower. Millions of people learned how to work from home, and whenever you have to learn a new skill at work, your productivity goes down. When an entire system has to learn a new skill, and there are not best practices yet, you are looking a massive decline in productivity.

Also people were lost in the cross over. There are people who still have jobs, and apartments, in NYC, but are living with their parents in Ohio. The BLS is not finding them, because they are not where the BLS is looking.

Right now, economists are lost. They are trying as fast as they can to get their bearings, but it will take time. You want an instant recession called... The reality is it will take them a record long time to figure out if there was a recession.
 
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