ABSTRACT
The Russians can build a jet-engine, a tank, a loom as good as any built by the West. The Russian system gets proportionately more capital equipment from its workpeople in exchange for much less of a material standard of life; it gets more and longer work out of them than do the Americans or the British or the French out of their people. A fall in the productivity of commercial clerks or bank managers in Britain would be as dangerous to our standard of life as a fall in the efficiency of coal-miners or dockers. It is difficult in a firm, an industry or a nation to say precisely how much of an improvement in productivity is due to specific measures: to redeployment or rearrangement of jobs or duties, to different methods or rates of remuneration, to better social or other conditions of work, to more or better use of mechanical equipment, or to better managerial skill.
