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PARTISAN REVIEW
productivity rose, and there was no longer a tremendous gap between
agricultural and industrial productivity. That fact by itself explains
about 17 percent of the decline in national productivity.
Another problem industry is construction. There, productivity
is down by about 30 percent, explaining another 17 percent of the
national decline. Construction productivity is very hard to define.
The government uses three indices
to
figure out the rate of inflation
in construction: The American Telephone Company index, the
Turner Construction Company index, and the index of the Bureau
of Public Roads. To argue that these government indices are wrong
(as some people do) is to say that these big buyers and producers of
construction do not have a clue what it costs them to build and buy
things. People are a little reluctant to say that. On the other hand,
there are some funny things going on in construction. Real output,
after correcting for inflation, from the mid-fifties to the mid–
seventies has supposedly gone up about 60 percent, but the use of
construction materials-steel, concrete, and so on- has gone up 170
percent. Can we believe every building built in 1980 takes two and
one half times as much steel as every building built back in 1955?
That is a bit of a mystery. Some of it may have to do with electri–
cal power because in the seventies we became involved in disputes
over nuclear power, and when we have a dispute, such as the one at
Seabrook, it shows up as a decline in construction productivity–
workers are on the job, but not working. Some people think it has to
do with roads because in the fifties and sixties we were building
interstate highways across Kansas, as a highly efficient, mechanized
operation, while in the seventies we were bogged down with projects
like the Westside Highway in New York. All of these factors may
have contributed to the basic problem.
The area of electric and gas utilities is as clear as construction is
murky. Back in the fifties and sixties, utilities had positive produc–
tivity gains of 8 or 9 percent per year. They now have losses. These
utilities explain about 8 percent of the national decline in productiv–
ity. The reason is simple: the manpower in the electric utilities has
shifted to the distribution network. As long as every household is
taking more kilowatts of electricity, productivity increases. But as
soon as households cut back on their use of electricity, output per
kilowatts consumed goes down, although you still need the same
number of people to maintain the lines. So productivity becomes
negative.
In
this industry, negative productivity is the national
policy, in order to lower the consumption of energy.
