-- thousands and thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of ma and pa grocery stores and drugstores and restaurants and many different looking, highly variable downtown mainstreets, that is the american culture i remember with love and respect. Is mass homogenization progress? --
It's that great god ma cog of efficiency's fault. It's much easier to mass produce stores, food, delivery systems, accounting systems, etc. Also easier to trouble shoot them to figure out what went wrong or what's broken. So you can have look a like easy to make, easy to fix or expensive one offs that cross your fingers they never break. Of course if the mass produced gets efficient enough, it gets cheap enough that when it breaks, just throw it away and get another.
And of course with a little ingenuity you can have variations of mass produced. I remember back in the 80's there were like 15 "brands" of VCRs but only 3-4 manufacturers in Japan. And efficiency and mass produced isn't all bad, for it is what raises the standard of living. So the increase in productive in a society is really a measure of how fast the standard of living is increasing. But we're talking a true increase in productivity, not the hocus pocus that they report today.
Pondering upon this it appears the only way to increase the living standard of a society is by increasing it's productivity and efficiency. So the goal of any society should be production and lots of it very efficiently. Anything else we will call it .... leisure time activity. Beats calling it dicking around. <g> The more I sit here and pondered this the more it explains. Such a simple little concept and yet the ramifications are astounding.
How productive and efficient a society is determines it's living standard. So simple a concept and yet so powerful. One could ask how does a military add to the productivity of a country. Well if you have barbaric neighbors and they routinely invade you, take your stuff and break everything, if you want to maintain your standard of living, you better get yourself an army to prevent that from happening. Of course using this concept one can see that the optimum solution for your barbaric neighbors would be to civilize them so they no longer invade you. But until you civilize them you better have a damn good army.
And one could use this to determine which companies to invest in. (Providing that you're not just scalping doing day trading and actually investing.) Those that are the most productive and efficient will have the highest standard of living, ie profitability. And it becomes easily apparent why Jack Welch was such a "great" CEO. He didn't have to really know anything much about all the different companies GE has. He just measured the productivity of every employee and once a year told the bottom 10% to take a hike. So he was continually increasing the productivity and hence the profitability. As long as he wasn't in a closed system and could continually bring in more productive people, that method would work.
Now one could wonder about the low utilization of our factories at present. Could be two things. The productivity and efficiency has increased such that we don't need to run them as much or misallocation of capital and we over built. Brings up visions of the Maytag repairman sitting around with nothing to do. Supposedly Maytag had gotten so good that there was nothing for their repairmen to do. Of course as a society transitions from a machine society to a service society (with it's foundation being machines) education becomes all important. The education level of the society than becomes the determining factor in how productive and efficient and how prosperous, how high the standard of living can get. Such societies become more and more complex. There may not be as much physical labor to do, but when the machines need feeding and care, somebody better know what to do.
Just look at cars. How many shade tree mechanics are there left? Anybody remember a tune-up? Other than change the oil, and maybe the spark plugs, air filter and possibly the brake pads, there is nothing to adjust. You can't adjust the carburetor even if your car still has one. Check the timing if you want. You can't change it, and they are starting to do away with the distributors. The points long ago disappeared. And in checking your emissions they used to stick a sensor in the tail pipe. That's now only on the old "archaic" cars. The newer ones they just plug into the computer and ask it. But if your car stops working, you better hope the computer can tell you what part to replace or you have an educated mechanic that can fix it.
I started with an off hand comment and ended up with a dissertation. At least I learned something, and yet I was the one writing it. <g> I wonder how this would apply to the current situation we find ourselves in. It seems to say that the solution is to increase productivity. And yet won't that cause people to have less and less "jobs" to do? But one could ask, doesn't the increasing of the standard of living imply that one has to spend less and less time at a "job" and has more time for "leisure activities"? Interesting ideas to ponder. I tell you, it's all that great god ma cog's fault.
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