Hi Ed and Harry, Interesting discussion!
I have long thought that productivity figures are highly questionable. The latest farce which emerged recently is that the miracle productivities of the late 90s of around 4% (ascribed to high-tech and the Net) have now been found to be faulty and should have been around 2%. (But is the latter figure meaningful?) We're also told that the UK manufacturing productivity has been half that of the US and Europe in the last 20 years. Even though manufacturing is a declining part of the economies of these countries, the productivity figures should have translated into very significant differences in the standard of living in US, UK and Europe. I don't notice such great differences. I think the productivity thing is similar to Parkinson's Law: "Work expands to fill the time available." In the case of productivity, "Something-or-other always expands to absorb (most of) the surplus." Large step-wise increases in efficiency have occurred throughout history, and yet there never seems to have been the sudden accession of wealth and freetime for ordinary people that one might expect. Probably the greatest step-wise increase in productivity occurred when hunter-gatherer-man became a settled agriculturalist. In the temperate zones each hunter-gatherer required something like 20 acres to supply sufficient food while only about 0.1 acre for agriculture. In an idealised first year of operations, that would have given a 20,000% increase in productivity! But I doubt whether the standard of life of the ordinary person changed a great deal during the transition. In fact, over the millenia the lot of the agricultural peasant has become decidedly worse in many respects. (His height and weight reduced, and his health was a great deal worse.) The "something-or-others" in this case were probably very numerous and expensive -- the need for a much greater family size (for intensive seeding and harvesting), the support of priesthoods/royalty in the new cities, the support of new professional crafts in the cities, and so on. And I think this happens constantly. I'm sure that certain innovations and changed practices throughout history would have meant, ceteris paribus, considerable step-wise increases in productivities. But, usually, other "something-or-other" corollaries occurred. Ed has pointed out some of these in modern life. I think one of the significant "something-or-others" which has not been mentioned so far is the growth of bureaucracies. These don't get out of hand in businesses because, sooner or later, the firm that becomes too bureaucratic goes bankrupt. But they always grown in empires of the past (and have been a big factor in their downfall) and have been growing inexorably in the course of the last century in nation-state governments. Despite valient attempts at privatisation by almost every government in the developed world since Thatcher's time, national bureaucracies seems to be growing steadily. (Even Thatcher only reduced public expenditure about one percentage point in all her 11 years.) It seems to me that this is going to lead to a world where smaller and smaller numbers of people are going to be the real wealth producers and, almost whatever productivity gains are made, the surplus is going to be absorbed in one way or another -- most of them pretty well invisible and difficult to measure. However, one immediate result of any new technology and productivity gain will be high salaries -- particularly astronomical ones to CEOs. It is easy to make emotive use of such salaries. The one made much use of by political protesters in recent years is that the CEOs of large businesses (and, by definition, these will be successful businesses with large productivity gains) have been receiving something like 400 times the salaries of their workers. But it should be remembered that, statistically, these are pretty rare cases and that the wages of ordinary workers in those particular industries have usually risen, too. (I've little doubt that these differentials will decline enormously in the coming years as pensions funds become more critical of boardroom decisions.) Whether increases in ordinary incomes will have translated into a step-wise rise in the standard and quality of life is quite another matter and is very doubtful. However, the money and time will be spent voluntarily and it's difficult to know how to make any meaningful comparisons between modern lifestyle and stress levels and that of our grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them and so on and so on. Keith ___________________________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org> 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
