1. If a shortage of cognitive resources is the problem, why do unemployed people do even less of the things Putnam measures than employed people do?
a. Does the fact of unemployment deplete cognitive resources to a similar or greater degree, perhaps because of loss of status?
b. Am I perhaps mislead by the unemployed people metric, and not comparing like with like? For example, if someone is not working because of disability, I expect that same disability to interfere with volunteer work.
2. No accounting for change in the environment. The omnipresence of advertising could have an effect; the extreme ease of communication could have an effect; both work and community are situated in the physical environment so if just being there demands more resources, that could partially explain it.
a. Although if the mechanism is real, we should expect both work and community to be adversely affected. I note productivity growth has been slowing down, but I have the impression that can be satisfactorily explained by productivity gains from computers achieving saturation and nothing else driving growth. I don’t know of any case where we see previously stable productivity actually declining, which the idea predicts.
When I look at US life expectancy at birth trends it sure seems like we’ve gotten worse at something per unit effort. I expect there are some other indicators like this for the developed world.
Some things that this idea doesn’t explain:
1. If a shortage of cognitive resources is the problem, why do unemployed people do even less of the things Putnam measures than employed people do?
a. Does the fact of unemployment deplete cognitive resources to a similar or greater degree, perhaps because of loss of status?
b. Am I perhaps mislead by the unemployed people metric, and not comparing like with like? For example, if someone is not working because of disability, I expect that same disability to interfere with volunteer work.
2. No accounting for change in the environment. The omnipresence of advertising could have an effect; the extreme ease of communication could have an effect; both work and community are situated in the physical environment so if just being there demands more resources, that could partially explain it.
a. Although if the mechanism is real, we should expect both work and community to be adversely affected. I note productivity growth has been slowing down, but I have the impression that can be satisfactorily explained by productivity gains from computers achieving saturation and nothing else driving growth. I don’t know of any case where we see previously stable productivity actually declining, which the idea predicts.
When I look at US life expectancy at birth trends it sure seems like we’ve gotten worse at something per unit effort. I expect there are some other indicators like this for the developed world.