They love fax machines for crying out loud!
And it only gets worse from there.
From FT Alphaville:
The remarkable productivity stagnation of the US construction sector
For the nearly half-century through 2012, annual labour productivity growth in the US construction sector averaged close to zero, and it has been negative for the past two decades.
Here’s a graph constructed last year by Paul Teicholz, a civil engineer who has been working on construction technology issues for a long time and who produced the best concise analysis of the sector’s productivity that I’ve come across:
The upward-sloping line represents the productivity of all non-farm sectors since 1964. The lines moving sideways or gently sloping downward are all measures of construction sector labour productivity, each using a different price deflator. (Knowing which deflator is appropriate isn’t obvious.)
Teicholz writes that despite some variations, “the general rate of decline is about the same: a linear trend line shows a -0.32% per year decline, while the trend for all nonfarm industries is positive 3.06% per year”.
US statistical agencies don’t break out construction sector productivity the way they do for manufacturing, though obviously they provide the raw data needed to estimate it. So if you want additional confirmation beyond Teicholz’s post, below is a chart from OECD statisticians showing the sector’s productivity growth in the decade through the financial crisis:
The actual tools and technology for building structures can’t be getting worse, obviously. Other forces are responsible for retarding progress in how the factors of production are combined in this sector....MUCH MORE
