[matheweis]

There are at least two dimensions to this that I believe that the author has overlooked:

1. Economies of scale. It may be that drafting something up in CAD takes more cycles to get right up front, but once you have an established design it is much easier to reproduce it by orders of magnitude

2. Changes in software. Software companies are ever changing their interfaces, decreasing productivity every time their users encounter this learning curve.

[pas]

And CAD models benefit from better technology "for free", better visualization, better heuristics (for rule/code/safety/conformance checking), and so on.

Did it make sense for military nuclear submarines back then? Well, maybe not, who knows. (Submarines are definitely not mass produced.)

But what this 'insightful essay' ignores is that productivity decreased overall in the 'West' (as the post-WWII boom ended) but then picked up right around the dot-fucking-com boom. Oh, wait computers. But maybe this glorified shitpost should have used recent datasets instead of spending its eruditeness budget on extra spicy and fancy words. (propitiate!)

https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/mckinsey%20global%...

https://cepr.org/sites/default/files/styles/flexible_wysiwyg...

https://www.caixabankresearch.com/sites/default/files/styles...