Productivity Rules The World

WHY IS THE US the most advanced industrial nation in the world? Because of productivity. OK. But aren’t the Japanese more productive than US corporations? That is true, in the manufacturing sector. But Japanese retailers are 50 percent less productive than the US. And productivity

in food processing [is] about a third of the US. And food processing, although it´s a manufacturing industry and it´s not heavily traded, it has more employment than steel, automotive, computers, and machine tools added together. So it´s much more important.

So, in the end it is the overall productivity that counts, not the headline manufacturing corporations.

What about education, you ask? Good question. Despite everything you have heard, education is not very important. Corporations the world over can train their employees to roughly the same productivity whatever their educational level. In

Houston, the US industry was using Mexican agriculture workers who were illiterate and didn´t speak English. So they were not any different than the agricultural workers who were building similar high rises say in Sao Paolo. And yet they were working at four times the productivity.

So what is holding back the Third World? It is two things. The informal sector can undercut efficient formal sector enterprises by not paying taxes and by counterfeiting brand merchandise. And domestic producers have the power to erect trade barriers that prevent efficient producers from making money.

It’s a breathtaking story. Read the whole thing as Nick Schultz interviews William Lewis, author of The Power of Productivity.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
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