2023-11-23
54 分钟Most industries have become more productive over time. But not construction! We identify the causes — and possible solutions. (Can you say ... “prefab”?)
This episode is about a problem.
It's a problem that has to do with how we build things in the US, but it's not a new problem.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development saw it coming more than 50 years ago.
There's a report called a decent home from 1968, which was commissioned by the Johnson administration that basically said that construction productivity in the US had grown about 2% per year in the forties and fifties and had, in the sixties, flatlined.
And that is Ivan Rupnik.
He is a professor of architecture at Northeastern University.
Productivity, as you probably know, is how economists measure the relationship between the resources that go into a process money, time, labor, things like that, and what comes out the other end.
Humankind has become much, much, much more productive over time, although not always, and not in every situation.
Let's say you get a new software program that helps you work work faster, maybe even better.
That might lead to a gain in productivity.
But if that same program is too complicated or glitchy, you might not get a gain in productivity.
Or maybe the new software is fantastic and fantastically fun and you spend hours doing something other than the work you're supposed to be doing, then your productivity might fall.
So the productivity arrow doesn't always travel in the direction you anticipate.
And what happens if productivity declines in an industry that is absolutely essential to our economy?
Here is what that Johnson administration report said.
There was a potential for major societal impact, not just for the construction industry, but for citizens, if that productivity either continued to flatline or decline.
The concerns expressed in that report turned out to be valid.
According to a new paper by the economists Austin Goolsbee and Chad Severson, productivity in the construction sector has fallen significantly over the past 50 years.
The value added by a construction worker today is about 40% less than it was in 1970.
This is exactly the opposite of how productivity has changed in most other industries like agriculture, manufacturing, information, technology.