Thinking About Productivity Wrong

My reaction on reading Robert Atkinson’s op-ed at The Christian Science Monitor, arguing for increased productivity:

We cannot increase people’s living standards, or expect America to lead the world, unless we rapidly increase productivity.

But productivity growth over the last decade has been the slowest since the government started measuring it in 1947. This is why the economy has been mired in sluggish growth. Productivity is the measure of how much we produce in our work days; the economy expands as each worker produces more. Productivity thus equals growth.

was that we have probably reached the point at which the low-hanging fruit in improving productivity by automating the tasks that minimum wage workers perform but in automating the routine tasks performed by the most skilled workers. Robotic hamburger flipping only gets you so far. You’ll get much farther by automating the tasks presently performed by doctors of medicine that could be performed by an expert system. Less artisanal medicine; more mass market medicine.

5 comments… add one
  • steve Link

    I would agree with this. Unfortunately, we are years away from doing it.

    Steve

  • Closer than you might think. There were diagnostic systems that could match human physicians 30 years ago. They couldn’t get FDA approval because FDA’s standards require that they be better than human physicians which is clearly the wrong standard.

  • Gray Shambler Link

    Here’s a thought, what if we all had a religious faith that a natural death was a welcome event not to be interfered with in any way.
    Doctors and nurses and all the manufacturers of medical equipment useless and unemployable. Health care costs zero.
    Would we as a people enjoy greater productivity? A higher standard of living?

  • steve Link

    While I am no IT expert, I go to an IT meeting every year that touches upon some of this stuff. We also have some decent connections with the IT folks in Pittsburgh who have worked on this stuff. It just doesn’t work very well yet, and there aren’t many places where you can use it and save money, and this is people using modern computers and programming. In most real world situations, not a computer lab, you end up needing to have a physician and the computer system. They end up as an added cost. That said, I think that tin a few years it may be viable for some primary care, radiology and dermatology. I had thought we were close to having some systems work for my field, but they have failed pretty badly when put into real practice.

    Steve

  • Andy Link

    I’m getting an MRI next week and the only way for my ortho to get the images is me bringing them on a CD.

    I had an interesting conversation with him – their office network had been attacked several times in the past couple of months, including two ransom ware attacks.

    Most medical offices I’ve dealt with have no secure means to transmit patient information to anothe office. Like everyone else, I suspect their cyber security is crap.

    I think we’ll get there eventually but personally I’m skeptical.

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