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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (218336)	2/13/2007 11:06:25 PM
From: jttmab	Respond to of 281500

First, demographics: the baby boom generation arrived at its peak years of productivity, earning, spending, and investing. Because many of them had never seen a crash, irrational exuberance came naturally. I agree. Second, technology: a whole generation of innovations moved from the geek world to the desktop and the shop floor, driving considerable increases in productivity. Yes and maybe...Productivity is a two sided coin. To some extent I think it's becoming an obsolete metric, or at least it's measuring something different. It's earlier use was targeted towards manufacturing. More machines, more widgets produced per worker. It's not quite the same. Productivity improvement is moving moving labor hours from the place of work to the consumer. Self-serve gas pumps, ATM machines, menu driven phone systems. It's always more efficient for the place of business, but not necessarily more efficient for the consumer and/or the consumer loses services in the process. Self-serve gas pumps. Faster than having a service attendant pump your fuel for you. But the technology doesn't pump more gas, it allows the consumer to be unpaid labor. I would guess that most of us on the thread are old enough to remember while your car was getting filled up, the attendant was washing your windshield, checking your oil and if you're really old, checking the air pressure in tires. ATMs. A net gain all around. [except for the bank employees that get laid off.] Auto checkout at the grocery store. You have the privilege of being unpaid labor for scanning and bagging your own groceries. The technology doesn't allow the consumer to do this as fast as the cashier. The grocery stores productivity is up, yours is down. Menu driven phone systems...very productive for the corporation. No humans involved. What happens to the consumers productivity? jttmab