'Productivity and innovation' hand-wringing

We're told over and over two things will save us all and make us rich: productivity and innovation.

I’m always skeptical when a metric becomes the goal. It seems to always end badly. The law of unintended consequences comes to the fore. Shooting half the population would double productivity overnight. Desirable with respect to the metric, but for the people shot.....not so much.

What bothers me about the productivity mantra is no one invoking it seems to offer a plausible way of achieving it. It comes across as more of a fervent hope or perhaps a mantra, in support of some article of faith. An economist's prayer. A politician's waffle-word. Doesn't really matter which country you have in mind. It's the same everywhere.

I suspect this is why nothing ever changes beyond more people being paid less and working more. Amid the smallband of real entrepreneurs are the larger group of ticket-clipping, self-styled ‘entrepreneurs’ who wouldn't know a winning strategy if they fell over it. If they did, they wouldn't be standing around waiting for someone else to innovate. They would be doing it.

Rince and repeat with respect to “innovation”…the thing that is supposed to deliver higher productivity…and which is also almost never defined.

Whenever I now hear someone talking about innovation to enable higher productivity, I generally save time and effort by noting “empty waffle” as my summary of what was said.

By all means, let's advocate whatever is good, but if all we are doing is secular praying, then let's be clear about that, too. Then at least we know nothing will come if it. On those relatively rare occasions someone in New Zealand does innovate and create a world-beating product, the usual outcome is someone from overseas then buys it and the intellectual property behind it and we end up importing what we used to make before many more years have passed. Production of whatever it was is then usually moved overseas to places with cheaper labour and strong armies who suppress any dissent. The economies of scale place close to large market are able to achieve mean it is rarely sustainable to actually make anything here other than meat, wool, dairy and fruit.

The people advocating innovation and more productivity never address these problems. If anything, the policies they typically advocate make them worse, not better...if the past 25 years of NZ manufacturing history is anything to go by.

The bottom line is, I can't see it happening while the present policy regime remains in place....however much hand-wringing and prayerful productivity / innovation hand-wringing goes on.