[farmingengineer]

After hearing a blurb on NPR this morning that the increase in worker productivity slowed the topic question came to mind.

Points:

As energy becomes more expensive will the unemployed workers affect the reported productivity? Will a potential loss in productivity be masked by unemployment and a shrinking GDP for a while?

How will the price and availability of energy intensive tools and processes such as long haul trucking and overnight deliveries affect productivity?

Will the appearance of more wheelbarrows, shovels and picks on road and construction crews (the ones still active) be the first obvious visuals of dropping productivity? Or will it be increased competition in the agribiz between small, labor intensive farms and the mega farms of today?

In my (current) line of work as a software developer the ever increasing availability of new tools drive increasing productivity.

In my garden the use of a wheelbarrow, shovel, hoe and especially irrigation vastly increase the number of calories I can produce with a given number of calories used. Will this soon become an economic indicator reported by the government?

I can just hear it.

Paul Kangas reporting: Last months numbers are now in – the average worker used five hundred calories to produce twenty five hundred calories. Nothing like walking five miles for a few pounds of spuds to wear off the old jowels, huh? Last year I only had to walk four!!!! Here’s wishing you The Best Of Goodbyes.

[Bas]

Good question, and I think you did a good job of answering it yourself as well.

Unemployment will indeed will mask the fall of productivity, and might actually push up the average productivity as the least productive jobs are more likely to go early than those producing a lot of value; the productivity number seems set to deceive us as it may deceive us right now with manufacturing jobs having left the western countries, the productivity rate has been "artificially" pushed up, while the actual production has left Western Europe and the US!

It seems to me that the best number to keep an eye on is the unemployment rate, but those numbers can be deceiving too as discouraged workers will leave the labor force.

[setag]

"May 3 (Bloomberg) -- Growth in U.S. productivity and service industries exceeded forecasts, easing concerns of a deepening economic slowdown and higher inflation.

Productivity, a measure of how much an employee produces for each hour of work, rose at an annual rate of 1.7 percent last quarter, the Labor Department said today in Washington. "

US worker productivity, in my opinion, will not go backwards until "peoples" stop working.

Americans will work even when they do not care for their job or type of work, cause the time does go by when you keep busy. Blessed is the person who enjoys what he or she gets paid to do.

[Euric]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('setag', '"')May 3 (Bloomberg) -- Growth in U.S. productivity and service industries exceeded forecasts, easing concerns of a deepening economic slowdown and higher inflation.

Productivity, a measure of how much an employee produces for each hour of work, rose at an annual rate of 1.7 percent last quarter, the Labor Department said today in Washington. "

US worker productivity, in my opinion, will not go backwards until "peoples" stop working.

Americans will work even when they do not care for their job or type of work, cause the time does go by when you keep busy. Blessed is the person who enjoys what he or she gets paid to do.

[DantesPeak]

All good comments above.

Keep in mind "US" productivity actually includes a lot of mostly finshed or partly finished goods made elsewhere. By offshoring jobs and production, companies generally improve their "productivity".

[setag]

Euric, I understand, but if the measurement standards remain the same then i would think the analyze could be used for some judgment for an increase or decrease in productivity.

"Productivity, a measure of how much an employee produces for each hour of work"

DantesPeak, interesting information. With this in mind, I guess the statistics from all this forecasting can be skewed.

[Pops]

If productivity measures dollar value of production divided by hours worked and the value of the dollar is continually falling, can’t things actually produced be static or even falling (at less than inflation) to give a positive productivity number?

If I charge 10% more for my tomato seedlings next year due to inflation, yet I actually produce 5% fewer seedlings in the same amount of time, wouldn’t my productivity has risen 5% even though I produced less?

[farmingengineer]

How connected to the real “needs” of people are these indicators, productivity and GDP. As Pops example showed, there can be an actual drop in something as basic as food production but still be an increase in productivity and under the right circumstances GDP. And I’m sure this example could hold for many other basics such as steel, concrete and timber production. Lord knows we consume way more of these basics than we “need” to (think McMansions and Hummers) but the reality is people will start loosing their jobs with less production of the above even while it’s possible to see some rosy basic economic measurements. I think Bas’s point of the unemployment numbers being the one’s to watch is about as good as it gets as far as trying to gauge how well the average Joe may be doing.

[setag]

it appears your production dropped, Pops !

Sure enough, i think percentages have been created to offset the negative inflationary effects. I am by no means an expert on this subject.

[Pops]

Of course with weighting and hedonic adjustments I think those CPI numbers are jiggered as well.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')nce the system had been shifted fully to geometric weighting, the net effect was to reduce reported CPI on an annual, or year-over-year basis, by 2.7% from what it would have been based on the traditional weighting methodology. The results have been dramatic. The compounding effect since the early-1990s has reduced annual cost of living adjustments in social security by more than a third.

[setag]

Pops, I regret the delay in my response, but the wedding was successful and enjoyable. I hope the marriage will follow suit!

But the fact of the matter is just now, I laughed just as hard and just as long as I would have last week at your most appropriate response.

You are probably right also. My guess is the "CPI" numbers ARE jiggered.

[MrBill]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', 'I')f productivity measures dollar value of production divided by hours worked and the value of the dollar is continually falling, can’t things actually produced be static or even falling (at less than inflation) to give a positive productivity number?

If I charge 10% more for my tomato seedlings next year due to inflation, yet I actually produce 5% fewer seedlings in the same amount of time, wouldn’t my productivity has risen 5% even though I produced less?

[mefistofeles]

The day we have to stop importing productivity from China and India. When that day comes the American worker will take a huge step backwards.