Today the BLS released annual productivity figures for various industries and I got sort of interested in which industries had done best and worst over various periods of time. Here is annual productivity growth over the past three decades:
This is about what you'd expect. The wireless business has become fantastically more productive since 1987, as have software, travel, and wired communications. Media has done pretty well too, including cable, publishing, and radio.
Now here's productivity growth over the past three years:
This isn't wildly different, though amusement parks have done inexplicably well. Ditto for truck rental and restaurants. Most likely, these industries are bouncing back from poor performance during the pandemic.
Now here's just the past year:
Gambling! What a comeback! And some stodgy industries like warehousing and sewage have done well too. Conversely, software has had a bad year, and so has media. Even wireless drooped.
Note: There are no great lessons to be learned here. It's just raw data.
It's easy enough to speculate a future where multiple LLM AI forks are narrowly tailored on programming languages, powering massive productivity gains in software. Soon, everyone will be script kiddies, and publishing apps.
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Your boss called.
He said your productivity has been declining, and has decided to turn to AI to replace you.
Good luck in your next job as a dog poop picker upper.
I wonder what it means for radio to have so much productivity growth, and it’s unclear to me if that’s a good thing. If it involves a number of technological developments in getting human voices, public service announcements, and other related goods out to the public then it sounds positive. If it means replacing every engineer and disk jockey with an algorithm or an AI, then I’m not so sure.
Sometimes I see a chart, compare it to my mental map of the world, and conclude something is off. Accordingly, I can't reconcile the tremendous innovations made in warehousing (thank you Amazon, Walmart etc) with a chart that shows this section as a huge laggard. Something is likely off...
A hiring bonanza and long delays in shipping might do it
Is this basically total revenue in that industry divided by total hours worked? Thanks.
I hate to nitpick but...
"This isn't wildly different, though amusement parks have done inexplicably well. Ditto for truck rental and restaurants. Most likely, these industries are bouncing back from poor performance during the pandemic."
You say this for a chart showing the change from 2019 to 2022. The pandemic didn't begin until 2020. So a change from 2019 to 2022 means they're doing even better than before the pandemic. So...
I think there might be lessons to be learned from digging in deeper. I'm looking at the Water & Sewage number over the past 30ish years. A lack of productivity improvements in our utilities seems like it might be due to poor governance. I feel like we should have a national think tank that is constantly looking at ways to improve the productivity of our public infrastructure.
I sure would like to see some inventive ways to increase the water supply while lowering the cost.
All I'm seeing is fnords.