The IT Productivity Paradox (2008)

mginszt•about 19 hours ago

> IT investments don't appear to increase overall productivity. In truth, IT is benefiting the firms that invest in it, but it is taking away from those firm's competitors yielding no net gain. As Erik Brynjolfsson puts it, "IT rearranges the shares of the pie without making it any bigger."

The theorem presented on this site strikes me as extraordinarily bold, yet it seems to rely on sparse and selectively chosen evidence. I cant' wrap my head around how could the `automation` not increase the `productivity`.

Likewise, I don’t understand how a company could capture a larger share of the market without, in some meaningful sense, becoming more productive.

tonyedgecombe•about 17 hours ago

After forty years in the industry it struck me that I am doing the same work for the same customers over and over.

In the early days we were printing invoices on daisy wheel printers with carbon paper, then it was dot matrix that allowed bold printing, then it was lasers which introduced proportional fonts, then it was colour printers and graphics, then it all shifted to email and PDF’s.

Fundamentally though it’s just a request for payment.

Of course you could stick with the legacy systems but customer expectations have moved on.

plumbees•about 12 hours ago

And now you have to create your own portal that hosts the pdfs so that the client can download it.

yeah at some point my job was: "I create complicated PDFs for clients that want them but will never read them."

plumbees•about 12 hours ago

Very interesting site. I share the consensus that the premise is bold and it has the "feeling" of having some good questions. I never thought of asking whether a computer is really adding "productivity". Maybe the "productive" element here for the company question is volume?

Not more efficient at handling this but more able to handling things at a lesser quality at scale.

nonameiguess•about 17 hours ago

Did you read the whole thing? In that same section of text:

> It is interesting to note that if this were an absolute rule for IT investments (which we believe it is not, as covered in our other sections), then investing in IT would be a waste of resources for the economy as a whole despite benefitting individual firms.

This site is surveying arguments that have been made over the years, one of which is the one you quoted. They're not agreeing with all of those arguments. In fact, they explicitly disagree with the one you're questioning.

The IT Productivity Paradox (2008)

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