Economists worry that some things resist being made more productive.
This is a problem because increasing productivity is the bush everyone hides behind when we want a way of paying for more government services without charging more tax.
Some things are easy-ish to make more productive and all the fun things with AI and robotics may give this long trend a further nudge. So if you take a driverless car to a driverless train to get somewhere, you aren’t paying a taxi driver or an engine driver, so it’s cheaper. Productivity has gone up. Similarly if you build cars on a robotic production line rather than employing workers to fit panels and tweak nuts, you can do the same thing. With the money thus saved you, and the state, can do things that you couldn’t previously afford – more government spending, no increase in tax.
But some things resist being made more productive. And perhaps we are nearing the end of long experiment in proving this. For example, you privatise a cleaning contract. The new firm sacks the cleaners and rehires them at worse conditions. Productivity has gone up but actually all you’ve done is grind the faces of the poor and apart for being monstrous, this will bite you back, right where it hurts. Perhaps by paying people less, you have to pay more by way of supplements to the lowly paid, for example, or face greater absenteeism and ill-health.
Or maybe you can cut GP appointments from 11 minutes to 8 minutes. You see more patients. Productivity is up. But that ignores the research that says a good relationship with a family doctor improves health and decreases hospitalizations. Longer appointments, not shorter ones, may actually buy you greater productivity alongside greater human thriving.
Or you can replace teachers with computers but what you end up with is a bunch of kids who can do procedural maths, not the deeply learnt, flexible, adaptive maths education that everyone needs. Their turgid education lasts a lifetime at goodness knows what cost.
You can improve productivity (or at least people have tried) in the care sector by making visits shorter, but it doesn’t work. Lingering over a cup of tea with your client may actually produce more life and fewer of the deaths and diseases of loneliness than zipping in and out making sure they’ve taken their pills.
We are slaves of increased productivity. As a slave-driver, Ramses II was an amateur in comparison. What are we doing to ourselves? We ought instead to be slaves of human thriving. Some things can be speeded up, fair enough. Some things need to be slowed down, and done with love and creativity and passion.