A great read on "productivity"
gold-eagle.com
the reason we have such enormous productivity gains, while utilizing fewer factories, is because we are slowly becoming nothing more than the final assembly or distribution point for many components manufactured in China and other countries abroad. We snap the pieces together like LEGOs® and lay claim to the full unit production. If 20% of the components are now produced abroad, we snap them together and claim 100% of the productivity while actually only producing 80% of the end product.
The amazing thing is that embedded in the bloated government "numbers", the "Puppet masters" actually claim credit for the production accomplished by the Chinese and others while touting the mega-advances in our productivity. Alan Greenspan said in his speech at the Securities Industry Association annual meeting in Boca Raton, Florida on November 6, 2003, "The combination of growing output and falling hours worked was made possible by a startlingly large rise in productivity." He was startled?
Alan Greenspan worships at the altar of Productivity to shroud his interest rate and fiat money policies. In this recent speech, he went on to offer 3 different hypotheses, "One hypothesis is that some of the increase represents a temporary rise in the level of productivity…."
I would have to say this job shift is looking pretty permanent as it's very hard to pry open the rusted factory shutters and retrain whole classes of skilled workers.
He went on to suggest, "Another hypothesis is that the level of productivity has undergone a one-time permanent upward shift. This hypothesis builds on the idea that the heavy emphasis on exploiting new and expanding markets from 1995 to 2000 likely diverted some corporate management from the hard work of controlling costs."
I have to agree, there's no more productivity left to be squeezed out of the American workers that still have jobs. Those that don't are feeling pretty much "exploited" as their jobs were moved into the "expanding" Chinese market. If we were somehow able to bring back the tens of thousands of jobs that produced towels, linens, clothing, and shoes---all low productivity/low dollar value goods---our Productivity numbers would actually go down. Would those workers that lost their jobs be upset by that? Sadly, using Greenspan's logic this would be a bad thing, because only the Productivity numbers matter. Those displaced workers lucky enough to find new jobs are working for much lower wages and benefits; and, then there's the 309,000 that recently just gave up. Does that mean they no longer exist? |
