Comment by aerhardt
19 hours ago
> "information technology" generally didn't increase productivity
Do you think it'd be viable to run most businesses on pen and paper? I'll give you email and being able to consume informational websites - rest is pen and paper.
Productivity metrics were better when businesses were run on just pen and paper. Of course, there could be many confounding factors, but there are also many reasons why this could be so. Just a few hypotheses:
- Pen and paper become a limiting factor on bureaucratic BS
- Pen and paper are less distracting
- Pen and paper require more creative output from the user, as opposed to screens which are mostly consumptive
etc etc
> Productivity metrics were better when businesses were run on just pen and paper
What metrics are these?
Productivity growth. If you take rolling averages from this chart, it clearly demonstrate higher productivity growth before the adoption of software. This is a well established fact in econ circles.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1V79f
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