Shouldn't We Work on Maximizing Worker Productivity?

"In debate over nation's burgeoning deficit, a surplus of worry," in today's The Washington Post, shows our national debt poised to skyrocket as a result of Uncle Sam's running huge annual deficits as far as the eye can see:

Our federal government is undertaking to pay for a lot of new stuff: health care reform, a military surge in Afghanistan, incentives to reduce our nation's carbon footprint, etc. Can we afford it?

We can if we can just get more revenue from income taxes and other sources than we project now. That would lower the anticipated deficits and, hence, the projected national debt.

The only politically acceptable way to get more revenue than expected is to grow the economy faster.

Economic growth is measured by gross domestic product. But growth that is based on anything other than increased worker productivity is but a temporary illusion. It is not sustainable. It is like the late, lamented dot-com boom: it's bound to go bust.

Worker productivity — how much real value each worker produces per hour worked — is where the rubber truly meets the road. The more valuable the goods and services produced by American workers, after inflation is factored out, the higher their wages or salaries can be, the more taxable income they can take in, and the more money Uncle Sam can collect.


By "workers" I mean everyone who is gainfully employed, not just those we used to call "blue-collar" workers, or "labor." Today, we are seeing "white-collar workers," "pink-collar workers," "green-collar workers," and so forth. Their productivity is a huge component of overall GDP.

It becomes a bit more difficult to measure the productivity of higher-ups like a corporate CEO, but the general idea is that CEOs' salaries ought to reflect the productivity of all those lower down in the pyramid — each of whose productivity depends on their underlings, and so on down to the worker bees who actually churn out all that valuable honey.

The more productive every worker-hour is, the more honey workers will produce. We need lots of honey, because huge amounts of it will soon have to be diverted from those who are currently employed to all those no-longer-employed baby boomers like me, to pay for our retirement lifestyles, our Social Security, our medical costs.


What makes a worker more productive? Well, technological advance, for one. When computers started talking to one another over the Internet, all kinds of productive jobs opened up.

Infrastructure, for another. The Internet is infrastructure, but so are roads, bridges, sewer systems, the grid that delivers our electrical power, natural gas pipelines, harbors, airports, rail lines, subway systems, and so forth.

Education is yet another source of productivity — that and worker training in skills required for doing a job.

Perhaps the most important source of worker productivity is energy. We need cheap, reliable sources of electrical power and of all the other ways we use to power our honey-making activities.


That last source of worker productivity, energy, needs to be not only abundant and, therefore, cheap, but also constant and predictable in its plenty and its affordability. That's where alternative sources of energy come in — wind, solar, geothermal, etc. Harnessing them will give us all the affordable energy we will ever need, someday soon.

The technologies we need to harness alternative, renewable energy will appear faster if the businesses that are intent on developing them can be sure that coal, oil, and natural gas prices will not drop precipitously and wipe out these various alternatives' profit potential.

This is why the best argument for lowering our dependency on carbon-based energy isn't necessarily the threat of global warming. It's that a switch to abundant, affordable energy sources like wind and solar will someday soon give us a basis for steadily increasing worker productivity, on into the distant future.


A switch to cheap, reliable, abundant energy can power the technological advance we need. It can provide us with the excuse we seem to need to invest in our nation's crumbling infrastructure, particularly that part of it which is used to distribute electrical power. Plus, we'll need better-educated and better-trained workers to manage our alternative, clean energy system and develop new ways to distribute the energy and tap into it after it arrives at the office, factory, or other workplace.

In fact, there will be whole new job categories such as Executive Vice President in Charge of Energy Strategies. It will be her worker bees who make sure that all the machines that sip electric power out of that newfangled "smart meter" on the wall of the factory or office are themselves "smart."

Smart machines will generate power as well as consume it. For example, a fleet of electric-motor taxicabs will charge their batteries at night when electric rates are low and return any unused charge into the power grid in the daytime when rates are high, thus giving the taxicab company an extra source of profits.

Our Executive Veep and her highly trained minions will be in charge of making sure those profits get maximized.

That's a whole new venue for American workers and their burgeoning productivity. Even if climate skeptics are right and global warming is not in fact imminent, we still ought to invest in alternative energy. Our nation's ability to avoid crippling debt may depend on it.