An alternative cause for the Great Stagnation: the cargo cult company

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Claims that advanced software and SaaS have failed to deliver broad productivity gains – contributing to a “Great Stagnation” in real economic growth – draw mixed reactions. Commenters debate whether the real culprits are cargo‑cult tech adoption, rent‑seeking business models, financialization and profit maximization, or flaws in how productivity and GDP are measured, especially in an increasingly intangible, attention-driven economy. Many highlight how modern, abstraction-heavy systems and web UIs can be slower and less effective than older, keyboard-driven tools, arguing that incentives around short‑term profit, ease of onboarding, and investor returns often override genuine efficiency and innovation.

Economic growth, productivity, and measurement

  • Several commenters argue that claiming “no (or negative) real growth since PCs” is fringe and contradicts mainstream real-GDP data.
  • Others distinguish GDP from median wages: real GDP and productivity rose while typical worker pay stagnated, especially post‑1971; they link this to fiat money and redistribution toward capital.
  • Some question whether “productivity” is even a meaningful or humane goal; others strongly counter that productivity is precisely what lets people live better with less hard labor.
  • A few suggest part of the “stagnation” is mismeasurement: intangibles, entertainment, and online output (memes, TikToks, etc.) are undervalued, producing a “productivity paradox.”

Tech’s role in stagnation vs progress

  • Many resonate with the idea that much modern software is “running to stand still” and not showing up as real productivity gains.
  • Others argue recent decades clearly produced huge real advances (smartphones, shale oil, EVs, AI), so tech can’t be the main culprit.
  • Some see tech as over‑promising and mainly delivering short‑term profit, not broad living‑standard gains.

Cargo cults, SaaS, and rent‑seeking

  • Multiple people feel the “cargo cult company” metaphor is overused or misapplied; bandwagoning and misattributing causes are distinguished.
  • There is extended debate over whether B2B SaaS is “rent‑seeking”:
    • One side stresses that charging for maintained, evolving software is ordinary profit‑seeking, not rent‑seeking.
    • Others see perpetual subscriptions as akin to “rent” and part of a desire for passive income and dependency.

Profit, investment, and inequality

  • Long subthread on what profit “does”:
    • One view: profit funds investment in new firms, powers pensions/401(k)s, and is economically desirable.
    • Another: profit often exits the productive cycle into luxury consumption and shareholder extraction, weakening incentives to boost real productivity.
    • Disagreement over whether equity financing is conceptually like a loan and whether uncapped returns distort behavior.

User interfaces and actual productivity

  • Large consensus that many legacy terminal/keyboard‑driven systems were far faster for expert users than today’s GUI/web/SaaS replacements.
  • Examples: retail POS, insurance, pharmacies, banking, internal workflows; migrations to “modern” systems often brought huge latency, complexity, and hardware bloat.
  • Explanations offered:
    • Shift to easily trained, high‑churn workforces, so discoverability is prioritized over efficiency.
    • Management and consultants chasing fashionable interfaces and microservices rather than measured throughput.
  • Some note that similar high‑efficiency UIs could be built today, but rarely are; expectations have been lowered to accept slow, bloated software.

Leadership, consultants, and organizational dynamics

  • Several commenters read the article as sliding from critique of abstraction into a “great CEO” / cult‑of‑personality pitch; some suspect it doubles as sales copy/consulting marketing.
  • Others agree that executive understanding of what truly matters is crucial; strong leaders can resist fads but can also do great harm when wrong.
  • Skeptics say tying decades‑long macro stagnation to executive quality or “cargo cult SaaS” is too ambitious and under‑evidenced.

Broader structural causes and open questions

  • Alternative explanations raised: neoliberalism and financialization, rent‑seeking enabled by debt, corporate short‑termism and ROI‑driven management, underfunded long‑horizon R&D (e.g., fusion), worker/environmental protections, and post‑1971 monetary changes.
  • Some suggest “Great Stagnation” might be more about political and institutional choices than about technology per se; others remain unconvinced the stagnation narrative is even empirically correct.