Every company that has an economist working for him has one employee too many.
Making labor less expensive helps firms hire people.
American labor will realize that its function is not to increase jobs, but to multiply the wealth and to expand the numbers benefited by the wealth at the swiftest possible rate.
If people really liked to work, we'd still be plowing the land with sticks and transporting goods on our backs.
Man acquires wealth in proportion as he puts his labor to better account.
The better his [a laborer’s] machinery, and the more readily it can be obtained, the larger will be his production....
America’s first political economist
Generally, we have translated greater output in the few hours of work per week over the last century. And that's a good trend of the future. But we do have to have a system that, as output of goods and services keeps increasing per capita, that it takes care of the people who are willing to work and really are not getting by very well with a family on a 40-hour week.
Autonomous tractors would enable a farmer to focus on the work that matters the most on a farm.
The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.
If we boost productivity, we can improve economic growth.
The economy of human time is the next advantage of machinery in manufactures.
An increase in the productivity of labour means nothing more than that the same capital creates the same value with less labour, or that less labour creates the same product with more capital.
The most efficient labor-saving device is still money.
It is plainly evident that, in a country where land was to be had for the asking, fuel for the cutting, corn for the planting and harvesting, and game and fish for the least expenditure of labor, no man would long serve for another, and any system of reliable service indoors or afield must fail.
When you're running a company, creating jobs is the last thing you want to. When you're running a company you want to employ as few people as possible, and yet you inadvertently create jobs.
Personnel and their capacity for work on their exact jobs is the basic key to income and success.
Only with free laborers could farmers enjoy a real sense of security, for slave labor brought only dangers, expense, and troubles: they frequently deserted, and then they have to be punished, as our sentence books, with their many sad examples, bear witness. Two Europeans could do the work of three slaves.
It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.
In the last analysis, productivity of labour is the most important, the principal thing for the victory of the new social system.
Think back to the time when Agriculture was not labor efficient. We have lost all these jobs. But I don't think anyone is too sad about it.
Fundamentally, the basis of all modern progress is the efficiency of labor. And the only sure road to restored prosperity is through the thrift and hard work of our people as a whole.
It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves.
It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
You can pay certain people more money and stuff but that's just going to be a transfer from one group to another. The only way people's wages are going to rise overall, or average median income is going to rise, is if you increase productivity.
Whenever the work is itself light, it becomes necessary, in order to economize time, to increase the velocity.
