I’m just using the word in a general English sense, not an academic one.
But you’re right, I should have said “output” there instead of “productivity”. Flipping your equation around, you get:
output = labor productivity * manpower
Which is what I was saying, allowing for some sloppiness in terminology.
Productivity/output can’t be looked at in isolation. At any given instant in time, if you double the people working on something, you get twice the output. But over time, twice the number of people will improve the rate at which improvements come. And so years layer they will have more than twice the output.
An isolated, shrinking nation can depend on the rest of the world for the technological innovation that drives productivity increases. But that doesn’t work if everyone is shrinking, or if the high-tech nations are preferentially shrinking. Or if they aren’t shrinking yet, but a smaller fraction of them are in the years where they contribute most to progress.
The output of information is shared among everyone, so there’s a compounding effect. Twice the people in the movie industry means everyone gets twice as many movies. Same for software and drugs and really the majority of things in modern society.
Ok thanks: I honestly wasn’t clear. The standard (Cobb-Douglas) equation would be something like this:
Q = A*((L^alpha)*(K^(1-alpha))
So yes, output rises with labor. But we shouldn’t really care about output per se. What we should care about is per capita output or Q/Population. That ignores information, which has public good characteristics.
There is an economist who argues that Q/P scales with population. But he in no way represents to the consensus. I suspect most economists put a heavier weight on resource depletion defined broadly so that clean air is a resource. I suspect you are familiar with this cite:
You are describing scale economies and they are a big part of intro economics, not to mention a few Nobels. They can be rising, declining, or constant. I wouldn’t assume that they invariably are increasing: if that was the case we wouldn’t see middling productivity growth in the service sector.
No. We don’t have to assume that. There is no reason to assume that. It certainly has NOT been the case to date that multiplying a population by N over time changes productivity times N. Yes because innovation non linearly begets innovation no matter the absolute population size.
Now possibly pertinent to this thread is a different take: Will a working population dominated by older workers be as likely to be coming up with the new and different approaches? Or do the big ideas in arts and science and industry generally come by middle age?
Certainly there are areas of the economy where there is no growth. After the invention of the electric razor, how much has barber productivity increased? I suspect it’s not much. Maybe not much even with the electric razor. It’s a few people per hour today and it was a few people an hour a millennium ago.
But farming is like 100x better.
Somewhat, though I haven’t actually read it.
Interestingly, recycling lithium-ion batteries (like for an electric car) is now more than 100% efficient. Since newer batteries store more energy using the same materials, and recycling an old battery recovers practically all of the inputs, you can get more than 1 kWh of new battery out of 1 kWh of old battery. This won’t stay true forever, but it’s a neat fact for now.
Well, you can always weight certain factors to make things look bad. There’s nothing wrong with counting pollution as a negative per se. But you should probably do it by counting lost life-hours or something rather than putting an arbitrary scale factor on it.
Overall? Yes, massively. And we’re better for having both iPhone and Android to choose from.
At the same time, clearly we’re going through some adjustment when it comes to education and other effects. So “smartphones are a tremendous good” can still coexist with “smartphones don’t belong in the classroom,” for example (I don’t know that the latter is true, but it might be).
Maybe a hundredth? Size definitely matters since you need to have enough people to learn the various specialties needs for the research and production of advanced technology. If the population was small enough there just wouldn’t be enough warm bodies to fill the needed slots. But that’s more an “establishing a space colony” or “rebuilding after an apocalypse” problem than anything else.
Also, there’s the issue that resources, education and opportunities are nowhere near equally distributed, so we aren’t even close to fully utilizing the human capital we already have. A more socially just society could be significantly smaller and still have just as many well-educated specialists as ours. Or more. People working in sweatshops because those a re the only jobs available aren’t going to be doing scientific research no matter how smart they are.
Yes, there are a lot of moving parts here. For perspective the global consumer class (very broadly defined) is suppose to increase 25% between 2023 and 2031. The population during that interval only rises by 7.5%. It’s possible that rapid development will create a pool of capable immigrants from Africa that will fill eldercare positions over the next 20 years or so. The Economist seems to think so. World fertility is currently at 2.24, so we’re above replacement (though pop growth is slowing). That’s not a process that can go on forever, but it could plausibly kick the can down the road until we learn to manipulate fertility rates better. That will be a necessity over the long run.
But that’s another thing that’s if anything more of a social justice issue. Poor people don’t consume much if the way of unessential consumer products; they’re lucky if they can afford basics like food and shelter. Wealth being more equally shared means more consumption outside of the narrow luxury market for the wealthy, which does make it more practical to have such things as a healthy demand for consumer electronics. And a better economy in general.
Of course this is another politically intransigent issue. The Right hates poor people and thinks the middle class shouldn’t exist. And the modern Left are largely misanthropes that lean toward a flagellant attitude of “consumption is bad, humans are wicked parasites, everyone should have the bare minimum to survive and hate themselves for how evil they are for wanting more”.
Well, no - you said immortal, not indestructible. We’d continue to lose people to accidents (and likely the occasional suicide)
Even if they’re not “productive” in the sense of being employed full time, keeping people healthy enough to take care of themselves, stay in their own home, able to cook/clean/go up and down a flight of stairs and so on greatly reduces the burden on society as a whole. Even better if we can avoid, put off, or reduce the burden of things like type II diabetes. At this point we can reap savings from increasing the healthspan, and reduce suffering at the last portion of the lifespan.
Not everyone views work as an intolerable burden. There are numerous retirees who go back to work. What is needed for the older cohort is neither full time work nor complete idleness but options more in line with their physical limitations (even the healthiest and most fit will not be as strong or have as much stamina as in their youth), part time work in particular.
And if we can keep the elderly healthy and fit, that is, increase the healthspan, then neither the elderly nor the youth will have to sacrifice as much, or possibly anything at all, to “take care of the elderly”. I would prefer a world where the majority of the elderly can take care of themselves. There will, of course, be some that do need care, the goal here is not perfection but improvement.
We already know how to do some of this but, like adjusting the birthrate to an ideal, the problem is getting people to actually do what is desirable. Weight control, management of chronic conditions that do arise, healthcare that focuses more on prevention and maintenance of health… But “eat right, exercise moderately, and take your pill for X chronic condition” just isn’t sexy enough I guess.
Yes, yes, we SHOULD be doing that today. I could name a half dozen of my current co-workers who are exactly those people - retirees who continue to work part-time at jobs that are not physically taxing. Two of them are in frail health (one has had part of a foot amputated due, I suspect, to diabetic complications, the other is simply frail) but the other three are fit and healthy. Oddly enough, both the fit and the frail want 1) extra money 2) structure to their lives and 3 interaction with people. The company I work for has a number of people in their 80’s still working, from door greeter through management through the executive level. Also has people as young at 16 working for them. That strikes me as a healthy “society”, where people are allowed to contribute for as long as they are able to do so and where there isn’t an arbitrary cut-off based solely on the calendar.
Yes, on average the elderly need more care. On the other hand, NOT using the elderly to the extent they can be productive doesn’t reduce that burden, but allowing opportunities for them to contribute offsets some of that burden. Just because someone has health or mobility problems doesn’t mean they can’t do anything, that’s ableism.
That statement assumes that ALL the elderly will become completely helpless. Maybe if we put more effort into maintaining health we’ll have 80 and 90 year olds still capable of living on their own, managing their affairs, wiping their own butts, cooking their own meals, and requiring minimal help with tasks requiring physical effort. Some of them might even continue working in some capacity.
Not everyone old is feeble. Ideally, you want to push “feeble” to the far end of the lifespan and minimize how much time is spent in that condition.
If we extend the health and productivity of people past traditional retirement age and into their 70’s and 80’s that will reduce the burden on the younger part of society and alleviate some of the ills brought about by an inverted demographic pyramid. Is that the whole answer? No. But it will alleviate some problems and improve lives towards the end of the lifespan so that strikes me as two good things.
That still leaves the issue of replacement-rate births and what is the “ideal” population for the planet and our civilization, but buying time to work that out is, in my opinion, another good thing.
Yes, we should. Now that there are more healthy old people in the world, we should adjust our standards to better use and better serve that part of the population. Whether or not the birthrate changes.
(Fyi, i just unretired for a very part time job. It’s too early to say how that’s going.)
Umm. No, the very young are a resource suck. Increasing the birth rate increases this effect. And that’s one of the reasons people don’t have more kids. Because that resource suck mostly falls on the parents.
Yes, there are so many levers other than birthrate.
I don’t deny that South Korea appears to be headed towards a demographic disaster. I do deny that the US is, and i deny that the world is. There are so many other levers. And world population growth is still slightly positive. We have a lot of time to adjust. We don’t need to push Americans to have more babies.
And to state the obvious, a bunch of people who don’t live in Korea, and don’t understand Korean culture, are not going to solve Korea’s demographic problems.
Okay. We have a fundamental disconnect here. I don’t think we are as individuals happier because our tools and toys are one thing then or another thing now that was not even imagined of in the past. I strongly suspect my grandfather seeing a silent movie was as happy with the experience as I am seeing a movie on IMax.
Yes. (And I once tried to start a discussion with a “what if” of a Methuselah medication hypothetical and tolerance for risk.)
Switzerland and Israel are great examples. Both countries could be self sufficient on their own, in the sense that they’d just about be able to feed everyone. But they certainly wouldn’t be centers of innovation in that scenario.
In Switzerland, 1.8% of the population works in agriculture. In Israel, the number is 0.7.
Worldwide, the number is higher than 25%.
Innovation is possible in small countries because they are highly specialized. They can be highly specialized because they are tiny, and feeding them is a rounding error for big countries.
Specialized technological societies rely on large numbers of people outside the country providing basic goods and raw materials. They are not proof that you can be innovative with a low total population.
Not if those countries specialize in making cheap stuff and raw materials while smaller, more developed countries specialize in innovation. In that case, you’d see that smaller countries are richer and more productive per capita, but those countries could not exist as they do without trading with the bigger, poorer countries.
Isn’t @Dr.Strangelove just saying that if you have 100 farmers in one valley and 10,000 farmers in the other, all else being equal, the valley with more farmers will innovate faster?
Which is exactly what you say - information is a public good?
Both societies might eventually discover crop rotation techniques, for example. But the larger society will likely do so first, because there are more people thinking about the problem.
And this has knock on effects. Now that the big society has crop rotation, they need fewer farmers to feed the same population, so more people become pottery makers and the society discovers pottery techniques faster too. Etc.