Production efficiency methodology that breaks every action, job, or task into small and simple segments which can be easily analyzed and taught. Introduced in the early 20th century, Taylorism (1) aims to achieve maximum job fragmentation to minimize skill requirements and job learning time, (2) separates execution of work from work-planning, (3) separates direct labor from indirect labor (4) replaces rule of thumb productivity estimates with precise measurements, (5) introduces time and motion study for optimum job performance, cost accounting, tool and work station design, and (6) makes possible payment-by-result method of wage determination.
Named after the US industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) who in his 1911 book ‘Principles Of Scientific Management‘ laid down the fundamental principles of large-scale manufacturing through assembly-line factories. He emphasized gaining maximum efficiency from both machine and worker, and maximization of profit for the benefit of both workers and management. Although rightly criticized for alienating workers by (indirectly but substantially) treating them as mindless, emotionless, and easily replicable factors of production, Taylorism was a critical factor in the unprecedented scale of US factory output that led to Allied victory in Second World War, and the subsequent US dominance of the industrial world. See also Fordism.
Global Trade War, Trump Edition
Legions of Trump supporters have legitimate grounds for discontent. As my colleague Peter Goodman wrote last week:
Trade comes with no assurances that the spoils will be shared equitably. Across much of the industrialized world, an outsize share of the winnings has been harvested by people with advanced degrees, stock options and the need for accountants. Ordinary laborers have borne the costs and suffered from joblessness and deepening economic anxiety.
.. The story of Trump’s amazingly successful movement is also the story of how Democrats turned their backs on their working-class roots and sided with the elites on the crucial economic question of our times: Who would win from globalization, and who would lose?
.. Trump’s strategy is essentially one of withdrawal from the world economy. He wants less trade and less outward foreign investment. He offers no plans for how to improve our export performance. This is protectionism, pure and simple.
Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management, was more forceful:
No nation can succeed by trying to protect the past from the future. We will succeed by having the confidence to embrace competition, and leveraging our comparative strengths, which are numerous. We have the largest, most productive and most technologically advanced economy that’s ever existed on this planet. The more open the world economy is, the more we have an opportunity to leverage our many strengths.
Looked at this way, Trump’s stance is an implicit admission that he and his followers do not “believe in America” — an argument that the United States cannot compete successfully in the world arena unless protected by the imposition of high tariffs and punitive taxes on foreign production and foreign competitors.
.. Trump’s trade proposals, Reich argues,
assume the U.S. can’t compete and must erect trade barriers lest other countries flood America with better and cheaper products. That’s the opposite of believing in America.
.. Free trade is not surrender, and not something that only suckers do. In fact, just the opposite. Closing our borders would be surrender to a nonexistent enemy. It would make us poorer without bringing back the jobs.
.. Many economists share the view that Trump’s trade proposals would beruinous to the American economy, but in order to retain union support, Hillary Clinton has not been able to directly challenge Trump on these grounds.
.. “Withdrawing from global competition is a particularly terrible idea for the United States right now, since we are on the verge of introducing much more capable robots into the manufacturing process,” Daron Acemoglu, the lead author of the research paper “The Race Between Machine and Machine” and an economist at M.I.T., wrote by email.
Once the advances in robotics are achieved, Acemoglu wrote,
many of the tasks now offshored to China or other low-wage economies can be performed even more economically by robots in the United States. This won’t bring back the semi-skilled jobs that have left (and gone for good whatever Trump says he will do) but might just ensure that a whole slew of non-production jobs and supporting production jobs surrounding these tasks locate back to the United States.
.. Trump has a vastly exaggerated sense of the contribution of trade and trade policy to the decline of manufacturing in the U.S. In terms of real manufacturing output, the U.S. has actually done pretty well.
.. If the United States were to impose a 35 percent tax on Mexican imports, according to Summers, the economies of both countries would suffer:
It would be one of the best things that ever happened for Asian and European competitors.
.. Trump’s trade proposals reflect his bullying style and his technologically uninformed approach to tackling America’s competitive vulnerabilities
Econ Duel: Will Machines Take Our Jobs?
Why Are Politicians So Obsessed With Manufacturing?
From an economic perspective, however, there can be no revival of American manufacturing, because there has been no collapse. Because of automation, there are far fewer jobs in factories. But the value of stuff made in America reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016, even after adjusting for inflation. The present moment, in other words, is the most productive in the nation’s history.
.. One of Trump’s keynote proposals is to encourage domestic production by taxing imports — an idea more likely to cause a recession than a manufacturing revival.
.. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 64,000 steelworkers in America last year, and 820,000 home health aides — more than double the population of Pittsburgh. Next year, there will be fewer steelworkers and still more home health aides, as baby boomers fade into old age. Soon, we will be living in the United States of Home Health Aides, yet the candidates keep talking about steelworkers. Many home health aides live close to the poverty line: Average annual wages were just $22,870 last year. If both parties are willing to meddle with the marketplace in order to help one sector, why not do the same for jobs that currently exist?
.. The manufacturing boom of the postwar years was an oddity, and there will be no repeat of the concatenation that made it happen: The backlog of innovations stored up during the Great Depression and World War II; the devastation of other industrial powers, Germany in particular, which gave the United States a competitive edge.
.. The old working class still controls the megaphone of the labor movement, in part because unions have struggled to organize service workers. Manufacturing was, logistically speaking, easier to organize. There were lots of workers at each factory, and most knew one another. Service work is more dispersed and done in smaller crews.
.. The Harvard economist Lawrence H. Summers estimates that by midcentury, one-third of men in their prime working years, between the ages of 25 and 54, will not be working.