The more honest statement is that productivity always grows going into a recession and falls going out of one. This is a known pattern[1] emerging from the marginal response of firms: the least productive workers, on a profit per hour basis, are laid off first. And the last to be rehired. So in a recession, average productivity goes up alongside unemployment. And as hiring ramps up out of a recession, the opposite happens.
Unfortunately, the COVID recession was partially imposed on the economy, and so whatever natural cadence the business cycle possesses is overlapping with the next recession. So in a few months we'll likely see stories about productivity increasing again.
edit: I just want to make a point that low productivity doesn't mean bad. Bad productivity is _negative_. Low productivity is just much closer to the "hurdle rate" that capitalists use to determine whether to fund projects, making the jobs riskier than the typical 30% margin SaaS products the HN crowd is most familiar with.
[1]: http://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/research/e... (the first citation i could find, not nessecarily the best)
As the countless number of stores closed entirely or with massively reduced opening hours shows, societies that over-pay for bullshit jobs (=investment bankers, C-level executives, ...) and under-pay workers who do actual work in gruesome conditions don't do well either once workers realize the power is with them.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo both believed in the labor theory of value.
Wrong, value is created subjectively, by other people desiring the products of that labor. If nobody wants what the laborers created, then their labor had no value.
Roll a rock up and down a hill all day. You'll work hard as hell but you'll create no value. Anybody who denies the subjective theory of value is out to lunch.
Sit and stare at a rock and you have created no new value.
Labor can also destroy value, for example when a building is destroyed in a riot, or when a rock is pushed up a hill to a location that makes it less valuable.
but most raw material requires applied labor to become valuable: at the very least transportation to them
Everybody makes misteaks.
Which is an insane amount of time and probably does not actually increase productivity. The math does not check out as you claimed though.
I say this while sipping my morning coffee, browsing HN and waiting for an amount of computation to finish on a single machine that required either a supercomputer or multi-million dollar cluster 20 years ago.
productivity growth is always rewarded, it leads to more goods at lower prices across the economy, so everybody's standard of living goes up. This is a very real effect; consider how small percentages of inflation cause pain throughout the economy, the same pain is produced through productivity drops.
Whether I knock it out of the park, or slack off, I get pretty much the same outcome. Loyalty is not rewarded - see the recent layoffs.
Now, I’m not complaining, I just think maybe more people are waking up to the drawbacks of being an employee.
All my extra energy is now focused toward side businesses - as those start paying off, my contribution to GDP is likely to go way up.
The alternate, potentially more honest, statement should be that productivity hasn't increased at the same rate as it did in the past. I'm not the only employee who has realized that working harder year after year isn't physically or psychologically sustainable, and is rarely (if ever) rewarded.
Someone is angry we're not working hard enough.