Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WillAdams | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, the person who said that obviously never checked on book and magazine and newspaper typesetting --- cue old news stories about the last compositor at a given paper finally retiring after decades of the sinecures which the composition unions bargained for rather than participating, causing a loss of typographic skill and knowledge which resulted in the ghastly appearance of the "DTP revolution".

I once participated in a project where we worked up a database-driven typesetting system for a company whose annual publication had a staff of a dozen (3 managers (one of whom mostly did ad sales), 3 full-time compositors, 6 part-time) and when we put in the system they quit paying their expensive annual license for maintenance on the proprietary composition system, and fired two managers and 1 compositor and half the part-timers.

The staff was commensurately larger when they switched to the first electronic composition system they were using from the typesetter and paste-up they initially used.

> the person who said that obviously never checked on book and magazine and newspaper typesetting

That's one of the "everywheres" the author of the statement was talking about, which is the point - you could see every part of the economy seemingly improved, but it did not show up at the macroeconomic measurement level.

It was until the 2000s that computers caused an uptick in measured productivity at the GDP level, though.

The number of books being published has been steadily increasing for decades since computers became prevalent in typesetting --- is that not measurable?

Admittedly part of that is caused by the change in tax laws making it untenable for publishers to maintain a backlist.

> is that not measurable?

It was not on a level that nudges GDP growth for a long time. The irony is that maybe the productivity didn't increase until book publishing plummeted, since enabling a lack of physical books was a huge productivity win.

This isn't a debate about whether industries improved. When you look at GDP, do you see an uptick in GDP or not?

The original quote was often seen as a paradox. At least one major interpretation of the original quote is that "the computer revolution is so obviously helping the economy, that if it doesn't show up in GDP, is it even a meaningful measurement, and how can we fix that?"

But it is very fitting to discuss that quote - the original article discusses multifactor productivity, the same relevant measurement, and earnings of the S&P 493. There are two ways to interpret it - is AI not increasing productivity, or are we not measuring productivity, and is there "dark matter" somewhere in the economy that is not being properly measured?

I think we're looking at two different sides of the same coin.

The thing is, increased efficiency doesn't always yield a larger market in the short term.

There are only so many copies of a book listing television stations and demographics for marketing purposes which the market will bear as in this specific instance.

It takes a while for the displaced workers to get retrained and find other jobs which allows them to produce/consume more.

On the flip side, Nintendo hiring a couple hundred folks to make a game such as _Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword_ suddenly created $50 x 600,000 in value on the day it was released.

Exactly what the quote is about!

And that's a critique of the original article... that the broader "S&P 493" isn't showing gains might be for the reasons you describe.

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