Comment by alephnerd
4 hours ago
FYI about terminology before people who don't read the paper comment
1. GPT means general purpose technology or any sort of new technology that has a compounding effect on productivity, not the OpenAI model.
2. Productivity in this case means economic output, not the colloquial definition that means "hard work". If it takes 5 automotive factory workers to assemble a car manually but 2 with industrial automation, then the latter are more productive than the former despite expending equal amounts of effort.
3. The crux of this paper is that existing economic metrics are not able to adequately measure the impact of IP and R&D driven innovations in the larger economy. For example, think about how it took 20-30 years for traditional econometrics to fully gauge the impact of digitization and industrial automation that began in earnest in the 1990s and early 2000s.
> 2. Productivity in this case means economic output, not the colloquial definition that means "hard work".
The colloquial definition doesn't mean “hard work”, it also means you “produce” more (optionally, for the same amount of time). The difference is how you measure what's being “produced”.
With the “economic output” definition a barista in a posh bar in SF is “more productive” than their counterpart in a popular place in rural Minnesota, because it generates more revenue, even if the later serves twice as many patrons while also keeping the restroom clean (which would colloquially make the later “more productive”).
“Economic output productivity” can also decline if consumer spending do so, not because workers are “less productive” (in the colloquial sense), but because unsold goods or services don't count as “economic output”.
(IMHO overloading things that have a well-defined colloquial term is a very bad habit of economists and it makes things needlessly confusing for laypersons)