What Productivity Does

Michael Lind interrupted some grand theorizing about the long cycles of American politics with an odd parenthetical:

(Note: I’m talking about the material, real-world manufacturing and utility economy, not the illusory “information economy” beloved of globalization enthusiasts in the 1990s, who pretended that deindustrialization by outsourcing was a higher state of industrialism.)

Julian Sanchez picks some of this apart, but there are more problems with Lind’s characterization of the situation. For example: During our period of alleged deindustrialization, industrial output has been rising. And that was during a period when a strong dollar disadvantaged US manufacturing and when the housing/construction boom shifted a lot of “making stuff” activity into the “building buildings” sector that doesn’t count as industry. Now we’re primed for output to fall, but that’s because of a cross-sector recession not because we’re deindustrializing.

The whole concept of deindustrializing suffers from a fatal ambiguity. In one sense, the United States some time ago went through a massive wave of de-agriculturalizing. But in another sense, we still have a very large agricultural sector — tons and tons of food is grown and/or slaughtered right here in the US of A. That sector just doesn’t employ very many people. But that’s not because people have stopped eating or we’ve stopped making food, it’s because we’ve gotten more productive.

It often seems like common sense to believe that if a society gets really good at doing something, then tons of people are going to be doing that thing. But oftentimes the reverse is true. Vastly improved agricultural productivity means fewer farmers. Improved industrial productivity means fewer people in factories. And, indeed, improved information technology will in the long run mean fewer people doing information work. Consider that there used to be a very robust “information economy” of people answering phones and taking messages for executives, taking dictation, managing vast cabinets full of files, correspondence, etc. But now computers and voice mail and so forth take care of a lot of that work.

The future is likely to entail increasingly numbers of Americans working in fields where we’re not seeing any dramatic improvements in methods or technology. Teaching preschool. Cleaning houses. Cooking food all up and down the scale from lowly burger-flippers to high-end chefs. Taking care of the elderly. That sort of thing.