Where has all the productivity gone?
&gt; The Great Dissipation.<p>Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process, and very little real work gets done.<p>To be honest, I think it might be an inevitability of the productivity boom.  Thanks to technology and automation, it&#x27;s possible for a single individual to accomplish what it might have taken dozens or hundreds of people to do a generation or so ago.<p>When it becomes possible for for a small subset of the population to create enough value to support essentially everyone else, it it just changes the parameters of the social game we are all playing.  When essentially all the manpower is needed to progress society, the optimal strategy is to reward the most productive individuals to incentivize others to increase their own productivity.  When there&#x27;s an excess of productivity, the optimal strategy may be to put yourself in a position to capture the value of those few productive individuals.<p>But I think it&#x27;s also something we can try to address via IP law.  Currently we don&#x27;t do a very good job of incetivizing creating something new.  The current state of patent law essentially serves to bully small players out of the market who cannot afford to defend against dubious patent claims.  Copyright is used as a cudgel to keep small creators from iterating on culture.  In a lot of ways, it&#x27;s fair to see the game as rigged, and to come to the conclusion that it&#x27;s not really worth it to create something new.<p>If you ask me, the single best thing we could do to improve productivity would be to make it easier for people to own the products of their creativity.