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A comment on Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant?.

Re:Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant? by svara on Sunday July 23, 2017 @05:23PM (#14834477)
The idea of "zero-sum" economic activity sounds sort of plausible. And it feels like there's a lot of truth to it, but when I think about it harder I find it really difficult to nail down what that actually means.

Most of the examples given in the article are of things that you could argue provide a sort of "infrastructure" service: Legal services allow businesses to have confidence in their contracts, financial trading serves to allocate resources efficiently, advertising solves the problem of discovering new goods and services.

Yes, I know that sounds like a crazy optimistic view of these industries, but how do you know which parts are useful and which aren't? Do we know it's even possible to remove the useless parts and keep the important ones?

It seems to me that one interesting definition of "value of this activity" would be: How many other activities depend on it? By that particular definition, any activity that provides some sort of "infrastructure" would be particularly valuable.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant? by dharma1 on Monday July 24, 2017 @06:15AM (#14837190)
While there is definitely some need for tweaking government/tax incentives on some of these, to direct money flows to better purposes, I think (hope) free markets will drive down the prices of some of these "infrastructure" services like legal and financial services as ML automation starts kicking in
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant? by matt4077 on Sunday July 23, 2017 @05:42PM (#14834565)
Legal services aren't infrastructure. They're legal services. We know what that means. It doesn't need metaphors to be comprehendible, especially not completely wrong ones.
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Re:Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant? by ridgeguy on Sunday July 23, 2017 @08:31PM (#14835155)
"We know what that means."

I don't. I found the parent's post a bit thought provoking.

If you'd expand your thoughts, it might be interesting.

[ Parent | on HN ]