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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Johnston who wrote (51444)	1/25/2006 10:49:03 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

I'm guessing you never had a job where you actually made a product because you have an almost child-like understanding of what rising productivity means. Since I've spent my whole career making a product, I lived through the fabulous changes that technology visited on my sector and the quantum leap in productivity in the last 10 years. In it's simplified form rising productivity means making more with less. Mostly less labor, but some great advances in productivity have come from dispensing with the product in physical form altogether. What I do is process information put into visual form. What we used to call photo processing. In the beginning this was a long process requiring many steps and the final output needed to appear on paper or film positive to be used, the paper or transparency then had to be physically delivered, like in a photographic print, a magazine, newspaper or brochure. Most images are still delivered in this way. The old process went like this: The pictures had to be shot with a camera, the film developed, the film printed, the shot chosen, then the paper print shot with a halftone screen, that film developed, then the negative had to be manually pasted into a negative with the type, the printing plate exposed and developed, the plate put on an offset press, press inked up, paper loaded and proofs made, then the final printing and collating of the document and the final delivery to the end user was made. For over fifty years this process was little changed. So many steps, it took a lot of man hours to do them all as well as a lot of consumables and people with unique skills. Some pictures had a time value, so the amount of time it took to do all these steps was not only expensive in man hours but expensive in that if you took too long the product was of little value when finished. Each year I worked in this industry I got faster at all the steps, new technology would come along and some manual steps were taken over by machines, my trays with chemicals became a continuous fed machine that pumped out a dry print in 70 seconds. I worked with two enlargers instead of one, etc etc. Then computers came on the seen and all Hell broke loose. The paper print was replaced by a film scanner, then film was replaced with a digital original that was processed on a computer and written to a CD. Finally all paper can be eliminated, the image can be created, processed and delivered in digital form to the end user. The product is still the same, the information contained in the image, but it is no longer in a tangible form you can hold in your hands plus it can be delivered to multiple end users without using any more labor input than delivering to a single end user. It still has the same amount of value to the end user though. Output can be measured in dollars because there is a market for the product. As you can see from this one example taken from many I could have used, it involves a lot more than shuffling money around. I can sort of see how it might look that way to someone who thinks of products as having to take physical form, to have weight in order to have value.