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History has proven for centuries that no political party or ideology can deliver what science and engineering cannot. The fact that we have two major political parties — some countries have more — while a scientific or engineering problem has only one best answer should tell us something.
Engineering has created a society in which even the poorest Americans (except for the homeless) have higher standards of living than pre-industrial monarchs and emperors, and neither the Elephant nor the Donkey had anything to do with it.
If I was ever to run for political office, my platform would be based entirely on Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” These entities are inarguable, implacable and natural laws of science, economics and human behavior. They belong to no political party, and neither unanimous legislation by Congress nor a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court can overrule them. “They showed us each in turn/ That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn.”
Kipling compared them to the Gods of the Market Place, or ephemeral “cloud and wind-borne” schemes that promise to deliver something for nothing. Examples include Dutch tulip mania (1637), the stock market crash of 1929, the dot-com stock crash in 2000, and the real estate crash in 2008. In all cases, people invested in things that they assumed would increase in price even though they did not create corresponding value. The consequences as depicted by Kipling were easily foreseeable:
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
We similarly cannot have inexpensive high-quality health care either through the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act or Republican proposals for caps on malpractice damage awards, as neither addresses the underlying root causes of high medical costs and poor quality. State Reps. Eddie Day Pashinski and Phyllis Mundy, on the other hand, introduced legislation to encourage health care systems to implement proven off the shelf methods created by the American Society for Quality and Automotive Industry Action Group. The state’s Republicans and the Pennsylvania Medical Society were the principal obstacles, but nothing prevents Governor Wolf and intelligent Republicans like Aaron Kaufer from reviving this agenda.
Neither the Occupy Democrats nor collective bargaining can deliver a viable $10 an hour minimum wage, but engineering and science can probably deliver a $15 or $20 an hour minimum wage. This is not speculation but proven fact as shown by enormous productivity and wage increases during the early 20th century, and the basic principle is very easy to understand. Suppose I told you that millions of men once literally held the secret of almost limitless wealth in their hands, but none ever exploited it to change the world beyond recognition. It was not until the early 20th century that Frank B. Gilbreth pointed out that the basic objective of military drills, which was to eliminate all wasted motions from the actions needed to load a musket, could be applied to civilian enterprises. Millions of soldiers had indeed practiced these drills for hundreds of years but, as stated by Sherlock Holmes, “You see, but you do not observe.”
Gilbreth also proved that brick laying, as practiced by millions of humans throughout recorded history, wasted 63 percent of the worker’s labor by requiring him to bend over for each brick. This is why this skilled trade underpaid its workers, overcharged its customers, and cut the employer’s profits simultaneously. When Gilbreth introduced a scaffold that delivered the bricks at waist level, masons could lay 350 rather than 125 bricks per hour, and with far less physical effort. Henry Ford carried the same concept to its ultimate level to make the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth, and also to create the American middle class.
The next time you go into a fast food restaurant, pay attention to how much walking and other non-value-adding motions the workers must make. You could not pay somebody like Wolfgang Puck much more than $7.25 an hour to do those jobs the way they are designed. The $15 or even $20 an hour jobs are there but they are simply buried under waste that hides in plain view. You can, by the way, pay well over $100,000 for a college degree in industrial and labor relations (ILR) or learn everything you need to know from one sentence from Henry Ford’s “My Life and Work”: “It ought to be the employer’s ambition, as leader, to pay better wages than any similar line of business, and it ought to be the workman’s ambition to make this possible.”
What our country needs is not more politics, but a single-minded and unified win-win agenda as stated clearly by Henry Ford: “The producers — from the men at the drawing board to the men on the moulding floor — have gotten together in a real union, and they will handle their own affairs forthwith.” How many legislators from both parties are willing to join this union?