Comment 41971

By jasonaallen (registered) - website | Posted June 15, 2010 at 10:05:08

Ryan - this is all interesting to note in the context of the report out today that Canada's productivity is #17 among OECD nations, and is essentially at the same level it was at in the early 70's. Some commentator on the ceeb this a.m. said that this was because Canada is reluctant to invest in new machinery and processes, and I couldn't help but think - what if powering those machines was prohibitively expensive?

Makes your initial question all that much more relevant.

A good example was to be found walking by one of the gardens that Russ Ohrt farms - someone had a very strange looking device that looked like a 2x4 frame with spikes on the bottom. One of Russ' helpers was using it like a giant lever to break up the soil. Something that could have been done much more easily by a rototiller, except that Russ' ongoing commitment is to people powered agriculture.

There are lots of ways that people have been leveraging simple, pepole-powered technology over the centuries, but it still begs your original questions - has there been any real advances in that productivity in the last 100 years. To which the answer is probably a resounding - No. As economists like to say "People follow the incentive." And the incentive since the last 1800s has been to build more and more intricate machines to take away our need to labour at all. To me, bread machines are the most glaring example of this phenomenon.

It will be interesting to see how society reacts to the shift backwards.

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