Looking at this picture is lost productivity. Stop it!
Middle-class peeves cost more money than exists | The Register — This article is hilarious
This led us to wonder just how much money is lost to enjoyable things that finger-wagging middle-class farts disapprove of, such as smoking, drinking, gambling, overeating, watching sports, and the like. The figures we obtained (about which more below), are staggering.
To get a proper handle on this question, we also calculated the social costs of crime, and the monetary losses to businesses from particular crimes such as computer trespass, insurance fraud, shoplifting, and so on. Finally, we factored in unavoidable, mandatory costs such as federal and state government budgets. We wanted to know just how expensive life really is, and just how badly thoughtless, self-indulgent people are stuffing it up…
Now let’s wrap up with the NCAA Tournament representing $3.8bn in lost productivity, the Super Bowl, which represents $821.4m in lost productivity, and the World Series, which represents $465m in lost productivity.
…We come up with a grand total of $7.39 trillion – well in excess of the $6.70 trillion that actually exists. That’s right, when you allow for the basic costs that we’ve all got to put up with, and the inevitable losses to criminals like Ken Lay and Ted Bundy, and then pile on the items that meddling little turds hate to see us enjoying, it all costs more money than there is.
Uh, I guess the lost productivity is exaggerated. Kind of a long road (if you read the entire diatribe) to the outhouse.I’m reminded when I read articles like this how people like to prove that something saves money with gratuitous malarky about lost productivity. In particular I rememeber how Xerox machines were sold with someone saying that a secretary using carbon paper costs $10 in lost productivity per carbon or some such farce. As if.
found by Andrew Orlowski
Get rid of the goofball posts, fill up the site with even more scantily clad (or, better deal; non-clad), let us all repair to that secret place where we do secret things and watch the non-productivity indicators fair jump off the scale. I’m talking Guinness records here!
Oh yeah, the juggling of monetary figures. A pot bust with a value of 8 million dollars. Piracy costing recording companies 4 billion dollars. My Uncle Floyd’s saucy 1950’s auto parts calander collection is worth 250 G’s. Sure. Where do these numbers come from and why do I suspect they’re all crap?
Goofball posts? Hm.
While this is humorous, and estimates of lost productivity and revenue are no doubt inflated, they are comparing apples and oranges.
How can the US economy generate $11 trillion in GDP each year, if there’s only $6.7 trillion “in existence” (i.e. in the M2 money supply)?
Because in one figure, a dollar is a measure of economic activity, and in the other, it’s a medium of exchange. (The third role of money is as a store of value.) The ratio of economic activity to the money supply is called the “velocity of money”. You can imagine that dollar in your wallet, or the digital dollar in your bank account, participating in one transaction after another in the course of a year.
Every hour we work and earn that 5 to ?? dollars per hour, we are creating wealth. The money supply measurements and GDP figures don’t say how much money exists. They try to measure, after the fact, how much of this wealth was actually created. The Federal Reserve monitors and regulates the money supply, but they don’t create it.
Also, it’s perfectly reasonable to say that 1000 years ago, the population of Earth lost out on, say, 1 trillion dollars in economic activity (in 2006 dollars), because of a lack of technology, capital, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, etc. if only all those things had already happened, and people’s muscle and brains (which are pretty much the same now as they were then) had been put to proper use.
Imagine how much more China would have produced this year if 800 million people were not (mostly subsistence) farming, but were participating in the rest of the higher-value-producing economy. If the Communist revolution, the “Great Leap Forward”, and the Cultural Revolution had not happened, that would not be so far fetched.
Since GDP only measures what wealth has actually been created, the amount of wealth that wasn’t created due to lost productivity is theoritically unlimited. Comparing measurements of what didn’t happen to what did and saying one can’t be larger than the other is incorrect.
Obviously companies and interest groups exaggerate with fuzzy math and faulty methodologies, but saying X amount of sales didn’t happen has no relation to what actually occured.
lost productivity rolls down hill. i do a lot of PC support for corporate directors. I can be in their office for a couple of hours and I see what goes on. Most of what they do is just talk on the phone and goof around with people who come into their office. My CEO actually spent 30 minutes of his undivided attention talking to my coleague who was going to retire in his office. Look at President Bush. The man has spent more time at his ranch than in the White House. workers are just following the big boys. It could be human nature too.