José Luis Ricón writes,
It also seems that buildng speed (this is all looking at the US now) was faster during the Great Depression years. Before and after it was slower.
My first thought is that you might have had some unusually productive construction workers, given the high unemployment in the economy. We think of blue-collar workers as homogeneous, but that is not the case. People who are more intelligent and more conscientious can be more productive at those jobs, at least if they are motivated. Which you would be during the Depression.
If this story is correct, then we should not long for the days when an Empire State Building could be put up quickly. Because we probably are better off with an economy in which those workers use their intelligence and conscientiousness elsewhere.
I suspect that, given the emphasis on getting people back to work (at least in electoral swing areas key to FDR’s serial re-election bids), a lot of government regulation was waived during the decade of the 1930s.
The horde of unemployed people during the Depression may have consisted disproportionately of relatively unproductive workers; those who still had jobs may have been, on average, relatively productive. So the work force may have been of higher quality during the Depression.
IIRC individual UE during the GD was short term with people frequently being out of work for a few weeks or months, and someone else displacing them on the UE rolls when they went back to work.
Fascinating topic.
The construction of the Empire State building is well documented and it is noteworthy for many planning innovations and excellent execution. Historian Carol Willis attributed the speed of construction to two factors: “A team-design approach that involved the collaboration of the architects, owners, builders, and engineers in planning and problem-solving, and the organizational genius of the general contractors Starrett Brothers & Eken” in her book Building the Empire State. Interestingly construction began before the design finished.
Examples of innovations cited in wikipeda: ” There were also cafes and concession stands on five of the incomplete floors so workers did not have to descend to the ground level to eat lunch. Temporary water taps were also built so workers did not waste time buying water bottles from the ground level. Additionally, carts running on a small railway system transported materials from the basement storage to elevators that brought the carts to the desired floors where they would then be distributed throughout that level using another set of tracks.” Trucks would deliver bricks by dumping them down a chute into the basement where there were two brick hoppers holding 20,000 bricks each that could be fed into the rail cars. Per wikipedia:
” because construction materials had to be delivered quickly, and trucks needed to drop off these materials without congesting traffic. This was solved by creating a temporary driveway for the trucks between 33rd and 34th Streets, and then storing the materials in the building’s first floor and basements. Concrete mixers, brick hoppers, and stone hoists inside the building ensured that materials would be able to ascend quickly and without endangering or inconveniencing the public. At one point, over 200 trucks made material deliveries at the building site every day. A series of relay and erection derricks, placed on platforms erected near the building, lifted the steel from the trucks below and installed the beams at the appropriate locations.”
The depression did mean workers were readily available and that they probably were eager to hold on to their jobs. The workmanship that went into the building has been extolled as masterly. By most accounts the 3,400 workers were primarily European immigrants and the famous Mohawk iron workers. One doesn’t get the sense that the intelligence of the construction workers was out of the ordinary high. Many no doubt were though, and would likely do well for themselves after the depression.
Having grown up in a blue collar family and having friends and family in construction, I doubt that it is lack of intelligence of any sort that led people to to careers in construction in the 50s and 60s but just the opposite. A lot of clever, hard working individuals managed to both farm and hold down construction jobs simultaneously. I had an uncle who farmed over 300 acres, feeding his own hogs, had a busy cabinetry shop with perpetualy backed up orders, and who taught residential construction at a local college. Many of their kids continue to both farm and work second jobs but the seconds jobs today are much more varied but often involve commercial driving which apparently pays better and is more flexible.
People are able to make as much out of their lives as they choose. It is a good thing that we do not have government assignment of jobs even assuming the government was able to competently match people to their highest productive use.
This is the primary reason why I don’t forsee a huge increase in factory workers in the US as the needs of very dependable factory workers and wages paid aren’t economic demand and supply curves. In 2009, I thought there was potential of the return of some factory jobs from China due to the decrease with inventories, needs of manufacture on demand with automation and creased US wages. (I thinks some examples of the above not a huge significant changes here.) However China appears to catching the automation bug and still decreasing the order to delivery cycle while the US labor supply is growing at slower rates. So Scott Walker forcing US manufacturing caused the whole FoxConn debacle that probably cost his reelection in 2018.
So the Venn Diagram of manufacturing plants needing dependable experienced family men at $15/hour are intersecting very few workers.
Most big construction projects involve lots of subcontractors. When a lot of construction is going on, they often aren’t available when the work is ready for them. Thus delays. On the other hand, when there isn’t much construction going on, they are ready, willing, and able whenever the general contractor wants them.
My town build a new high school during the depths of the recent recession. It was done ahead of schedule.
First, I don’t know anyone who’s thought it though that thinks having the classic “reserve army of the unemployed” in order to get buildings up faster is worth it.
Having people sorted into jobs they’re good at makes sense. If there was a way to have our cake and eat it – keep the knuckleheads off the jobsite and still have something for them to do, I’d think we’d have to do that.
One, perhaps horrid, way to view WWII is that it took putting 4% of world population to the sword to “fix” the economy.
My own experience in technology leads me to believe that if there are enough underperforming personnel, then they’ll have the center of gravity of that industry moved to meet them. Because it’s possible to make untestable hypotheses about technology into products, it will happen. Kabuki theater about these untestable hypotheses will replace productive activity.
Since these are emerging practices, it’s assumed that they’ll improve over time and output will rise. I’m not convinced we actually see that. Perhaps it simply takes a long time.
Higher education then specializes in these untestable technologies because of academic biases and tournament effects, Bad practicum ( and it’s not bad in theory mind you, but only in the net-net sense over the long term ) makes the practitioners miserable and reduces output.
Legacy systems done the old, crufty way have survived the “old whores and buildings get respectable if they last long enough ” filter but the kids have no earthly idea how to maintain them.
After being proven in the repair of scuttled German ships in NY harbor during WWI, arc welding didn’t advance with largest project being a 5′ dameter, 90 mile pipeline prior to 1929. Although, the Upper Carnegie building was build in Cleveland, OH, in 1928 using weldments instead of riveting. It is estimated welding saved 15% of the steel that would have been necessary for riveting. Other innovations were also developed such as the welded steel lattice which permitted piping to be hidden between floors.
Arc welding had significant developments after 1929, and, no doubt, the development of a body of trained welders over the decade.
1. There have been a lot of stories in the past few years about high-productivity, rapid skyscraper construction in China. Look up Broad Sustainable Building Company and see time-lapse of their pre-fab approach to Mini Sky City or other various other Chinese skycraper timelapse videos. MSC would have a value of 4,000 on Ricon’s second chart, completely blowing everything else out of the water by an order of magnitude, and indeed about 50x – not 50%, 50x – faster than what appears to be typical in the last generation. It seems it’s not a problem with technological innovation or advances in automation, planning, pre-preparation, and logistics. It’s possible they were using labor that was much higher skilled than the average local construction workforce, but I rather doubt it.
2. The vague, unspecified explanation of “regulation” does necessarily mean delays or slower projects, unless the regulations specifically or intentionally introduce delays, e.g., a safety day once a week for inspection walk-throughs, etc. Substantially increasing the cost of the project may actually incentivize adopting a business plan that invests extra resources into getting a job done more quickly, not less, because many of those burders are functions of time but which don’t scale with effort speed. For example, if it costs $3,000 / day to block off and redirect traffic around the relevant roads, that cost is the same no matter how slow or fast one does the work, so one has an incentive to accelerate construction speed.
3. It’s usually highly socially valuable to have at least a critical threshold of employees at all levels in any field – blue collar or otherwise – to have high levels of intelligence and conscientiousness, even if it’s a temporary assignment for young professionals just startings out, as in the military. This smart fraction provides a kind of repository of “in-house consultants”, and perhaps it is a kind of a Garett Jones “Hive Mind” insight for fields.
Charles Murray has written in several places about what happened to civil servant recruiting during the Great Depression, with the combination of (A) An extremely loose labor market (for example 30,000 applicants for 300 police officer jobs), (B) Expansion in (effectively counter-cyclical) government hiring and spending, and (C) Highly G-loaded civil service examinations without the identity-group quotas political thumb on the scales.
The bottom line is that the quality of public service almost across the board of scope, and of positive innovative reform and future leadership rose substantially, for at least a generation as some of these stars were incentivized to stick to the pathway of their professional careers and rise up the ranks. The converse is definitely true, that any field starved for talents becomes mired in sclerosis and stagnation.
Sociologically, there is the question of whether, as a result of the contingency of an exceptionally over-qualified and high quality generation of public servants, police, teachers, bureaucrats, military officers, etc. Americans started taking all that for granted and building in high levels of anticipated performance into their basic expectations of what should always be possible both here and abroad. It seems it took another generation to humble the resulting hubris by learning the hard way that personnel is policy and you can’t run the ship as well and in the same way with substantially lower quality sailors.