[joeatwork]

Something this article leaves out is that mostly, when people are given better tools, they don’t just produce more widgets per unit time: often instead they build different (more complex, better) widgets. When I was in school I read a study about this - a design shop had N draftsmen, they introduced CAD tools anticipating reducing the staff, and when researchers went back to the shop they had the same staff, but they were designing things that wouldn’t have been practical or possible before.