Why bother improving construction labor productivity when it's the legal fighting, paperwork, and unwanted-but-necessary shmoozing that grossly dominates project time? It wouldn't surprise me if it dominates cost soon too.
Edit:
Also in a lot of cases I'm not actually sure how you would do it even if you wanted to. There's some minor improvements with better tools (on several size scales) over the graph's time, but also increased expectations of quality, inspection, and safety. Maybe factory-produced prefab construction would help, but so far it hasn't been a resounding success.
Partly it's because there's several trades involved that work independently (non-parallelizable).
What we're also seeing in SF is a regression in building skills.
The Salesforce building had cracked steel beams, despite inspection by two outside companies, and the Millennium Tower has cracked and sunk 2 feet since construction, and may need to be demolished, despite consultants saying beforehand that piles to bedrock were needed in that area like every other tall structure in SF.
I would guess it’s been eaten by newer seismic design. A skilled framer can put nails in fast even with a regular hammer. Hammering enough nails to hold up the house by hand may well take the same amount of time as nail gunning enough nails into a sheer wall to pass modern inspection.
Also, framing is generally quite fast and accounts for very little of the labor involved in building a house.
I bet that a lot of tools have been good for productivity, but that the additional drag over the years has more than soaked it up. But I do think you've hit the nail on the head (har har) of the class of tools that have been the most beneficial: small-to-medium power tools.
Modern angle grinders with dust collection systems, cordless track saws, torque-controlled drills with tool-free chucks, the PEX plumbing ecosystem, 3-plane self-leveling laser projectors, brushless demolition hammers, etc. All this stuff is great.
In practice I think modern construction is (by time) about 70% paperwork, 20% pipeline stalls while waiting for some tradesperson to show up, and 10% actual work happening. Or at least that's been my less-than-deluxe experience.
I have no idea. But I have seem some impressive videos on YouTube of master carpenters nailing boards at near-nail-gun speeds.
So I could imagine the savings are more in terms of paying lower wages for someone with less training to do the same work as someone with X years of experience.
I'd venture to say that health, safety,. and related regulation is the chilling effect on construction productivity here. OSHA didn't come around til the 70s but plenty of implicitly required changes came about in the mid/late 40s, for numerous industries. On top of that, specific to construction industry, my theory is that WW2 hampered or reduced the available labor workforce while those in regulatory design positions were potentially exempt from the war and thus entrenched by the time 1947 came about. I could just be talking shit but I also would place a few bucks on being right.
Tools and materials available to construction worker are now space age by comparison, so this feels simplistic. Houses today are amazing, but a tunnel I guess is still the same.
The costs of a life has gone up since the 40's, probably by a factor of 10. $300,000 to ~$3 million. But they probably were undervalued then and overvalued now, this is a big productivity cost, human lives per house/project. Construction is one of the most dangerous industries.
I guess a fair point is, construction is still full of humans, now one agriculture(Also very dangerous industry) driver can sleep while their GPS tractor does it's thing.
It would be interesting to include the home owner reno factor GDP input, the empowerment of the amateurs is high with all the new tech.
From the report -
"Productivity in the US construction industry more than doubled in the 20 years following the end of World War II, reflecting productivity increases in the overall economy, huge investment in the interstate highway system, and housing in new suburbs, for instance. After this, however, the sector’s productivity appeared to decline for 40 years as the focus shifted from infrastructure projects toward more residential building, and repair and renovation work, which involves more complex sites"
I’d suspect that productivity gains are just masked by more complex construction.
A friend bought a house constructed in the 50’s in the Bay Area. The wall was just boards on the outside, tar paper and drywall on the inside.
Today, you’d have an vapor barrier, potentially foam insulation board, pink insulation in the cavity, special flashing, composite material for outside, etc.
So sure, we’re not that much more efficient when building when measured by time, but I’d argue the buildings are way better.
Why do we work? To eat food? If we had cut out the middleman and directly worked in agriculture, we would have no idle people to spread dissolution, no fallow land. The people would be unified and fixed and the military will be strong.
Edit: Also in a lot of cases I'm not actually sure how you would do it even if you wanted to. There's some minor improvements with better tools (on several size scales) over the graph's time, but also increased expectations of quality, inspection, and safety. Maybe factory-produced prefab construction would help, but so far it hasn't been a resounding success.
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