The Origins of Efficiency
By Brian Potter
Categories: Business & Money, Science & Math
Brian Potter argues that production efficiency—making goods and services with less time, labor and material—is one of the main forces behind material progress. He breaks a production process into levers such as better transformation methods, scale, less variation, cheaper inputs and smaller work-in-process buffers. Cases run from penicillin and light bulbs to steel, semiconductors, shipping and carmakers from Ford to Tesla. The book then asks why sectors such as housing, medicine and education have been harder to improve, and how the same levers might apply there too.