Also, I'm not sure I understand the distinction between productivity and efficiency. Isn't increasing efficiency just producing more goods and services per worker?
Miles _______
No. Efficiency is a measure of the rise in profit, and that turns out not be linked to labor or labor's commonly understood `productivity'. For example it is much more profitable to sell a piece of overpriced equipment than it is to employ guys like me who are paid half what the sales crew gets to either make or fix equipment in an existing client base. No matter how fast, skilled, and commonly understood efficient I am, I will never match the rate of profitability of employing one salesman. Therefore I am less efficient, and consequently I exhibit less productivity than the stupid twit, slime bag, scum sucking dog licking mother humper of a jerk who is my cohort in sales.
This should provide some insight into the nature of the class war on labor. Direct labor, as in making something has the absolute lowest rate of return, is the least productive, and least efficient way to make money. That is exactly why capital hates labor. Capital's dream is to never see another guy like me, ever again. This is the whole secret to neoliberalism. It abolishes labor by farming it and its costs out to somewhere else and then passes the resulting product around fifteen loops of bullshit to make money at every turn. It is more productive and efficient to manage the marketing, flow, and distribution of finished goods than it is to manufacture them. That's why we don't do that dirty work anymore.
So returning to the innovation and creativity question. About 80% of economic creativity and innovation is in designing business systems that depend less and less on labor and more and more on some form of business service, transaction, or make believe product, like a new twist on some existing contractual agreement.
Take Enron as an example. They figured out ways to milk every state consumer of gas, oil, and electricity by just owning and therefore controlling the pipelines and wires in a critical hub of the power industry. There was no tangible product. They produced absolutely nothing. Yet they were enormously productive, highly efficient and therefore darling of Wall Street and all the new wave neoliberals.
Another great example is the horseshit telecom industry. They get to charge me for an already existing telephone I have had for twenty years with all sorts of new `products' that all amount to clicking a mouse on some option on some screen on some computer in New Deli. Fucking nothing was `produced' and virtually nothing happened. Except now I get to pay more. That is a highly efficient and very productive industry.
As for creativity and innovation in the more commonly understood meaning of these words, no. Capital does not creat. It buys low and sells high.
Take the whole agribuz-pharma-med bio-science industrial complex. It must easily out distance anything the old nuclear-weapons-energy-military-hard science industrial complex of yore ever did. Pfizer, Novartis, Bayer, Monsanto, Duval, GE (medical division makes high end body imaging systems and scanners), or any of the giants don't bother with basic bio-science. They buy the people who did that kind of creative work in their publicly funded state university systems on federal grants. The industry pulls them in and chains them to the lab benches devoted to developing production methods on already existing product lines, like diabetes meds, where all the basic research has already been done at high public cost. Then when they find a niche, they send their lobbists to DC to make sure it is patentable, and therefore a `product' for which they own the sole rights to market the motherfucker. Short form. Drug companies don't invent drugs, they copyright them. This is a very hi-tech scam method of doing exactly the same thing---get rid of or transfer labor costs.
So, taking all this into consideration, I'd say about sixty to seventy percent of the US economy is complete bullshit. It's made up of legal fictions, non-product products like Enron, and other frauds and produces nothing. This high end superstructure of nonsense lives off of the remaining twenty to thirty percent that does actually provide for the material needs of the country, but that infrastructure is slowly dying. And in an irony I have never understood, its most essential components like food, clothing, and shelter pay the worst wages of any labor sector in the entire economic spectrum. When and if all the smoke an mirrors collapse, the US will join the UK of the post-WWI era. A third rate and rather crummy place that lives off its glory days of a lost empire and the financial manipulations of its elites.
I've tried to stay away from these rants because they really disturb me in the deepest sense of the word. I go nuts with rage at this bullshit. The economy is doing fine. It is just that we are living in a god damned nightmare, stumbling over the homeless in the streets, watching people we love die everyday, and instead spend our lives working at utterly useless jobs, pushing paper around and pretend to be producing something while adding absolutely nothing to the material benefit of the greater society. And this is the public good, because the economy is the public good. What's good for the economy is good for the country. Kiss my ass.
CG