I just read that the U.S. Labor Department is reporting that productivity shot up an annual rate of 4.7 percent during 2Q '05. This is the biggest gain since the third quarter of 2003, and it exceeded expectations by over half a percent.

As productivity goes, so goes our standard of living.

We all have a stake in this, and for our part, Motion System Design is putting the finishing touches on a yearlong article series focusing on productivity. Each article in the Peak Productivity series suggests ways to maximize machine productivity from the component level up. We ran a similar series two years ago, and if it had anything to do with this current bump, we can expect more good gains in the next few years.

Another reason I think productivity is destined higher is that industry will implement what it learns from yet another forward-looking series we have planned for 2006. Next year, we're going to help engineers supercharge new and existing machines by running an informative article series called Need for Speed. We plan to cover a different component each month, starting with bearings in January.

We could use your help, too. Tell us how you maximize bearing speed, or the rotary or linear speed of any other component. Trust me; you'll be helping yourself as well as many others.

It boggles my mind how "blind" engineers are to innovative technology. Railroad locomotives count, I think, as "motion systems." The diesel-electric locomotive has been the only way to go since shortly after World War Two. Now, with hybrid automobiles gaining popularity, generators, batteries, and electric motors are the only method to store energy from the IC engine for later transmission to the wheels. Personally, I think this is short sighted; IC-electric hybrids are too expensive and performance limited as compared to a different approach.

Back in 1939, in Germany, a series of trials were conducted using a diesel-electric locomotive and a diesel-pneumatic locomotive, each with the same engine. The diesel-pneumatic locomotive pulled the same train on the same schedule using 26 per cent less fuel. Of course, in 1930, the German railroads were not going to switch to petroleum fuel, and the technology was "forgotten." Now, as noted, diesel-electric locomotives are standard, even though less efficient.

The proper use of air as a transmission medium is discussed in US Patent #5,832,728. The trick is "adiabatic compression" with the compressor water/steam cooled and the steam mixed with the air, instead of wasting the heat. The compressed air drives a conventional "steam" engine. The Germans further improved efficiency by using the diesel exhaust to reheat the compressed air.

An IC-pneumatic hybrid road vehicle would have advantages over IC-electric as follow:

1. It's all mechanical, with ferrous metal technology, no scarce, toxic, or expensive materials: no nickel, cadmium, lead, copper, etc.

2. The components are less expensive and more durable than batteries, etc.

3. The available stored energy and power are greater. Batteries are limited in their rate of discharge, while compressed air tanks are not.

4. In the event a recharge from an external power source is desired, air tanks can be filled in minutes, while batteries take hours. Thus, under an "air quality alert", such a vehicle could eliminate the use of the IC engine and run entirely on compressed air, filling up at a gas (air is a gas)station as quickly as it could refill the fuel tank, thus achieving unlimited range. (All all-electric car can go about as many miles a day as a bicycle, even though the speed for a couple of hours is greater) Such refills would not require the huge electrical infrastructure that BEVs would need if produced in quantity.

I agree that increased productivity is a good thing. However, if this increase in productivity is primarily the result of the current U.S. work force working longer hours and assuming more tasks...I think such gains are bad for our society. I belive this is the case with this most recent trend of increased productivity, as is proven by the lagging job market.

"As productivity goes, so goes our standard of living."

This productivity is measured before the effects of explicit taxation and implicit taxation (inflation as measured by the printing of money and spending it, as well as compliance costs for regulations).

There has been an explosion of productivity in industry brought about by the widespread availability of inexpensive, powerful computers. Home and office computers, CAD software, PLC's, CNC's, and motion controllers alone have drastically lowered the cost of industrial equipment on a huge scale.

So why hasn't our standard of living in the industrial sector improved by a like amount? Start with almost half of everything produced being consumed by someone who doesn't produce. Add in money creation, in which money is created out of thin air, then spent into the economy. This theft is inflation. Throw in some rules and regulations, make this include environmental and workplace regulations with an army of tax-paid enforcers to harrass businesses in every aspect of their operation. Make it necessary to spend upwards of ten percent of payroll on tax law compliance alone. Add in rules that give unions stranglehold power over payroll costs and yet more unproductive work rules. Mandate insurance requirements, handicap requirements, OSHA requirements, various diversity requirements, family leave laws, and retirement plan specifications. Let cities hire full-time code enforcers to cruise the streets just to enforce sign restrictions. Let federal, state, and city entities pile on yet more requirements for any business that sells to them regarding minority hiring quotas and an encyclopedia of other ridiculous requirements. Let all levels of government add in energy taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, communications taxes, pollution taxes, inspection fees, gross receipts taxes, and taxes on anything else they can imagine. Stop the building of nuclear power plants, coal fired power plants, steel mills, mines, oil wells, refineries, and anything else that benefits mankind. While we're at it, allow lawsuits over any and everything to burden the largest industries to the point where substantial fractions of their costs are devoted entirely to paying lawyers to defend from other lawyers.

Wealth is created by the application of human thought and effort to materials taken from the earth and transformed into goods that are desired by other humans. Real taxes, ie the wealth that must be expropriated to pay for government services, can only be paid for out of this real wealth. Taxing a government employee is only paying him less, taxing a farmer is tantamount to taking some of his output away from him.

It has been somewhere around 15 years since the size of the public sector became larger than that of the farming and industrial sectors combined; the trend continues and is accelerating. We have ever fewer producers and ever greater numbers of consumers.

So why doesn't our standard of living rise with improvements in productivity? The answer is because it is more free for a business to do business in a communist country than it is in the United States of America!

What a perversion of justice, that our nation has turned into a welfare state of such proportions that our major industries are abandoning their home base including their suppliers and the very market itself, to invest in a communist country where the government owns half the stock, where they practice active censorship, and publicize that they shoot protestors in the street!

It is not because of labor costs. Our standard of living hasn't improved much, our productivity has improved, so the amount contributed by labor compared to how much the laborer actually gets to enjoy continues to increase. The labor cost of a thing is but a small fraction of the total, if you count what a laborer takes home and spends on himself when you discount the taxes he has to pay on everything he buys. The productivity of an American laborer is many times that of some peasant in a third world country. That was what gave us our standard of living and kept businesses profitable. Labor cost has always been cheaper in poor countries, but our productivity offset it many times over. Now, the total cost of doing business in the USA has to include so much unproductive cost and taxes that all productivity gains made in the last 40 years or so have been erased.

Meanwhile we graduate government high school students with perhaps 30% of them functionally literate (70% unable to fill out an application without laughable errors), and near 100% completely ignorant of mathematics, physics, chemistry, electronics, or mechanical engineering principles. The schools are centers for indoctrination in the principles of social democracy, diversity and environmentalism. More open mouths to demand ever more handouts, more social justice, more wind generators, and less pollution. And fewer and fewer able to pay for it.

Those who erect barriers to investment and production have tipped the scales past the point where our frenzied improvements in productivity can keep even; as our standard of living falls, smokestack businesses are fleeing the country with what capital they have left. Those who remain will be burdened with the unpaid share of those who have gone. The answers given to the problem will be more of the same poison that made us sick -- protectionism, taxes, regulations, legal costs. Unless they uncharacteristically loosen the noose, we are not likely to see improvement until the day comes when headlines are not about plant closings and businesses relocating to other countries, but rather full of sob stories about all of the poor, laid-off, unemployable government workers who have lost their jobs. Unfortunately, those will be the last to lose their jobs.

Here in Michigan, our governor is going around spouting that alternative energy is going to save our post-industrial economy. We have already been written off as unnecessary. Maybe they really don't understand. Can someone point me to the nearest hydrogen well?

Palpable untruths about the physics of energy production are being coded into law. Government grants are given to brazen charlatans who will promote the falsehoods to the gullible and erect plants to produce products that nobody will buy, good for some PR headlines for the governor and the stock-swindle alternative energy companies that will produce products and maybe profits 'sometime'.

All the flim-flammery and noise serves to effectively soothe the public with assurances that their all-powerful nanny government is doing everything possible to protect them, while concealing the fact that that they have destroyed the freedoms that made capitalism possible. And those greedy capitalists are less and less able to pay the way for all those necessary government services, and all those needy people who deserve lifetime jobs with lifetime benefits.


--John Danforth--
There's a little fire for your blog!