Post status: draft
Brian Potter, writer of the wonderful Construction Physics newsletter, gets into the brass tacks of how the relative material abundance of the modern world came to be, as well as the challenges we face in maintaining this trend, in his book The Origins of Efficiency. It is well-written and thoroughly researched. Highly recommended for anyone wishing to see more material abundance. The book very much inspired this post, but this post is not a review of the book. Indeed, this post is a riff on an idea that is not the focus of the book.
The Origins of Efficiency investigates how production process improvements lead to increased efficiency, but the idea that increased efficiency can result in more humane work (in addition to a more effective workforce) kept nagging at me. Could an increase in efficiency also be an increase in humanity? From the consumer’s perspective, increased efficiency typically results in more material abundance and should rightly be celebrated. Here, I’m thinking more of the production process itself and how a more efficient process can be more humane.
Primitive production methods typically require an immense amount of manual labor. As a process is improved, human toil makes way for special-purpose machinery, elevating humans to higher-leverage roles.
This dynamic goes beyond industrial production processes. Take household production processes such as doing laundry, for example. Consider this powerful anecdote Robert Caro shared in his memoir Working about the physical toll of pre-electric life on housewives in the Texas Hill Country:
“I’m round-shouldered from hauling the water. I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent while I was still young.”
(Excerpt worth reading in full here.)
Over time, industrialization has reduced physical load on the human body, although sometimes at the loss of autonomy. In the early 20th century, for example, Ford sought to reduce the “necessity for thought” for assembly line workers. Production efficiency went up and the price of a Model T went down, but they also had extremely high turnover. In 1913, to maintain a staff of 13,000 the company had to hire 52,000 workers.
As an alternative, consider Toyota's reliance on human adaptability. The challenges of high variation and low volume in the automotive industry lead them develop two related lean manufacturing concepts: jidoka and shojinka. Jidoka (or “autonomation”) is automation with a human touch, allowing a worker to stop the entire production line to address a problem. Shojinka is the practice of cross-training staff to work on different processes in order to respond to changes in market demand. In a complex environment like a modern production facility, treating humans like cogs in a machine is actually less efficient.
The history of efficiency is not simply one of replacing human labor with machinery, though there is a fair bit of that. It entails the continue application of that which most makes us human: our minds.