Processivity

Productivity is a misnomer – it should have been called processivity.

Products get cheaper when the processes to make them get more efficient.

The base raw materials don’t cost any more or less – they are just there.

The processes of extracting them, refining and transporting them have over time got much cheaper.

And so it flows, up the supply chain, to you and me, with our plastic entertainment.

Since the industrial revolution, processivity has continued to improve and in this process resources have been moved around the planet and they have mostly changed state along the way. Also the enthalpic value of a lot of stored energy has been converted to planet surface heat.

Wealth is a actually a measure of an implied ‘right’ to consume resources and energy

Until recently neither the quantity of resources nor the resultant enthalpic energy release of consuming them has been wealth limiting. In fact, the sharing of, and overall degree of wealth creation has been limited by something a lot more complex.

Processivity is driven by technology gains and the risks associated with the development and deployment of these – these technology efforts fail more often than they succeed. And there are more technology concepts than there ever is capital to deploy them. That is, technology is cheap and only the small fraction, the good ones, are worth more than their development costs.

The risks of failure of technology efforts in processivity gains has thus resulted in the requirement for risk management, patent systems, capital resources to cover risks, pooling of interests, disinterest by the risk adverse, and efforts to control the external world by legal and political structuring to buffer against these risks. A.k.a. Capitalism.

The risks in the development of processivity gains has been mirrored in society with a few people benefiting more from processivity gains through access to the means to reduce the risks of deploying technology for processivity gains.

Communism tried to socialise this access to the means of reducing technology risk only to find that they were disincentivising or not training the small fraction of the population that had the skills and talent to reduce risks. Comparatively they fell behind capitalism and failed due to that contrast. They might have failed anyway if the rate of processivity gains did not create enough wealth to underpin the required technology efforts.

The fascinating aspect of Capitalism is that the system was forced to drag along the masses, via tax systems and redistributions, in order to give them the means to consume the proceeds of increasing processivity. Concentrating all that wealth and consumption for the few was simply too constraining on the system – they would have hit the Pareto limit and run out of motivation (customers) unless the masses were included in the party.

And then it was discovered that the few, the potentially wealthy, the successful risk takers, were distributed across society. So there was a double benefit in including everyone in the processivity party, namely access to an increased fraction of people that could successfully manage the risks of processivity gains.

And therein lies the main differentiator between Capitalism and every other political system – the diminution of hereditary rights. Monitoring these would be a means of monitoring the ‘health’ of the planet (in a negative way) and capitalism itself (in a positive way).