Early on in a paradigm shift, when you have small moves, or people are still trying to figure out the tech, it's likely that individual moves are hard to distinguish from noise. So I'd argue that a broad-based, "just look at the averages" approach is simply the wrong approach to use at this point in the tech lifecycle.
FWIW, I'd have to search for it, but there were economic analyses done that said it took decades for the PC to have a positive impact on productivity. IMO, this is just another article about "economists using tools they don't really understand". For decades they told us globalization would be good for all countries, they just kinda forgot about the massive political instability it could cause.
> In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is based on what has happened so far.
Not true. The article specifically calls into question whether the massive spending on AI is worth it. AI is obviously an investment, so determine whether it's "worth it", you need to consider future outcomes.
> Even more surprising for me is that productivity growth declined during the ZIRP era. How did we take all that free money and product less?
This is not correct. Your link is only referring to manufacturing productivity, not overall productivity, which continued to rise. This Economist article has better information: https://archive.vn/6asPb. One hypothesis in the article that seems the most logical to me is that return on investment became so much better in other economic sectors that it siphoned talent from manufacturing.
This is an excellent question. My very unscientific suspicion is that the decreases in average attention span and ability to concentrate zero out the theoretical possible increases in productivity that computers allow.
But in my own words, while I think economists have always acknowledged there would be some "winners" and "losers" from globalization, I think there is widespread belief now that early globalization boosters misjudged how bad it would be for the "losers", they underestimated how much it would contribute to inequality, and they underestimated the destabilizing effect this would have on social and political systems.
At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the reality is for globalization's benefits if so many people are turned off by it that they want to "burn the whole thing down", as that's basically what's happening now.
But here's the thing - there is already plenty of documented proof of individuals losing their job to ChatGPT. This is an article from 2 years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taki...
Early on in a paradigm shift, when you have small moves, or people are still trying to figure out the tech, it's likely that individual moves are hard to distinguish from noise. So I'd argue that a broad-based, "just look at the averages" approach is simply the wrong approach to use at this point in the tech lifecycle.
FWIW, I'd have to search for it, but there were economic analyses done that said it took decades for the PC to have a positive impact on productivity. IMO, this is just another article about "economists using tools they don't really understand". For decades they told us globalization would be good for all countries, they just kinda forgot about the massive political instability it could cause.
> In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is based on what has happened so far.
Not true. The article specifically calls into question whether the massive spending on AI is worth it. AI is obviously an investment, so determine whether it's "worth it", you need to consider future outcomes.