Brian Potter, the author of the Construction Physics newsletter and a senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written a book with an ostensibly straightforward title: The Origins of Efficiency. As Potter tells it, efficiency brought us the abundant gifts of modernity. Doing more with less is the great miracle of our industrial age, but like most such miracles—antibiotics, the power grid, fertilizer feedstock, iPhones, and so on—our habituation to efficiency’s presence has reduced it to the mundane. Efficiency, as Heidegger noticed about “being,” appears all around us and yet feels so far from our full understanding. Potter seeks to understand, “specifically,” what is happening on a farm, inside a factory, or within a company when the costs of production fall. He seeks, in other words, to understand the very nature of efficiency
In this search, Potter uncovers much more. As I’ll explain below, efficiency is not one thing but many. What at first blush appears as a guidebook for laymen on industrial process improvement evolves into a book about history and a broader investigation into knowledge, technology, and experience. Guided by Potter, the reader’s preconceived notions about the nature of history’s flow begin to blur. It becomes more difficult to separate ideas from actions, theory from praxis, idealism from materialism. Instead, Potter invites us, by way of implication, to consider that the catalytic effect of these various syntheses is what drives the movement from one epoch to the next.
Before delving into Potter’s analyses, the means by which efficiency is achieved must be understood: production process. Potter defines a production process as “a series of steps through which input materials are transformed incrementally into a finished product.” In other words, the actions that transform your raw ingredients in a cooked meal. All production processes have five elements: (1) the method of production or the cooking itself; (2) the production rate or the speed at which you cook; (3) the input and output costs or the cost of the groceries and the finished meal; (4) the buffer or how many extra ingredients you have on hand; and (5) the variability of output or the consistency of your ability to make the same meal and make it well.
