Any man can pull a lever and destroy the world

This weekend, I read James Fallows' (@JamesFallows) piece on The 50 greatest breakthroughs since the wheel, and had a bit of fun discussing them with the family.  (For the record, putting semi-conductors ahead of municipal sanitation shows a bit of 21st century bias, but that is a point for another article.)  As a person who advocates for clean energy solutions to improving quality of life, I agreed wholeheartedly with the inclusion of electricity so high on the list (#2 after the printing press).  Electrification has done so much to create a platform for comfortable human life as well as social and gender equality - pumping water with electric pumps frees women in developing societies from the burden of fetching water every day.  Although they have turned into destructive forces as they have proliferated, and enabled a population explosion that has further exacerbated their impact, the inclusion of the internal combustion engine and steam engine in the top ten (#7 and #10 respectively) makes perfect sense.  Without getting further into the merits of what should be #1, #2 or #15, there was one item on the list that drew my attention:

As I discussed the list with my wife, she made the case that this should perhaps have been moved up the list a bit because of how drastically it changed the way we made, sold, and even purchased goods in the economy.  In thinking about it, I turned to another, more subtle, but even more damaging impact...the assembly line laid the foundation for the rise and fall of the middle class, and maybe even more specifically, the decline of public education.  Taking the case even further, it enabled the consumption economy that has put us in the precarious environmental position where we currently sit.

Prior to Henry Ford's assembly line, equipment, furnishings, household items, etc. were made by skilled craftspersons who trained under the supervision of a master and in turn passed that knowledge onto the next generation.  This provided for a more costly per-unit manufacturing cost, which limited consumption but also availability.  In turn this created a market that had limited demand and limited opportunity, rife with poverty.  There is no question that in ushering in a manufacturing process with higher output, it made goods more available to people of limited means, opening up markets to a larger swath of the population.  This, in turn, created more opportunity for employment, and along with anti-trust regulation and unionization, lifted our society out of poverty and led to the largest increase in the middle class in the history of civilization.

But this came at a price, one that we have yet to figure out how to pay and "secure the blessings of liberty."

The assembly line changed the skill requirement of the worker from one that required years of learning to one that required almost no learning beyond training to perform one task repetitively.  This put downward pressure on the education requirements...even the desire...on the behalf of the employers.  Instead of the potential for a growing of the learned class up and down the income chain, low-skilled manufacturing jobs offered good salary with low barriers to entry and limited the need for education among the better part of the generations of the 20th century.  This decreased competitiveness so that when globalization and technology eliminated the need for low-skilled labor, those displaced did not have the training or capacity to adjust to the new marketplace.

Public education has yet to fully respond to the shift away from labor as a commodity.  A system geared toward sifting out a minority and putting them on the college prep path, then preparing the majority for a minimum of basic life skills that will get them into the assembly line workforce, now has to tack toward a higher level of expectations for all students.  This shift now ironically focuses on assembly-line education, putting every student through similar and regimented curriculum with regular "quality control" in the form of standardized testing.  This comes at a loss of the broad cultural education that creates a citizen better able to adjust to a marketplace likely to change at least twice during their working years.

Lastly, and perhaps most deleterious, the commoditization of manufactured materials has enabled an economy based upon consumption, even when that consumption does not benefit our quality of life.  We measure GDP as the goods and services sold domestically and abroad, and growth has focused on increasing GDP through greater production requiring greater extraction of resources.  Add to this an economy created during an era of limitless energy, and a manufacturing system that exploited that resource to the fullest, and we have the perfect storm for exponential resource depletion and the environmental impacts that follow.

I guess in all this, I make the case that the assembly line should hold a place a little higher on the list.  It has been a driver for economic expansion, and for a short while ushered in prosperity for all.  However, the same conditions that created prosperity also created a culture and infrastructure that facilitated the decline of that prosperity for a large segment of society.  It also enabled an education system with low expectations, and a consumptive lifestyle that we now need to maintain our economy.  We now need a breakthrough to save us from the ills of the assembly line, while we still have some of the residual benefits of its innovation.