While the agriculture, retail, and manufacturing sectors have increased their productivity tenfold since 1945 in the U.S., the construction industry has only held steady.
Richard Florida of CityLab writes that while infrastructure and heavy industrial productivity is faring well, residential and commercial building lag behind, resulting in more expensive houses and fewer employment opportunities for unskilled workers.
Florida says that modernization — including ideas such as reshaping regulation, rethinking design processes, improving procurement, and embracing digital technology and automation — could result in gains that add $1.6 trillion in global economic output per year.
In other words, the global housing and infrastructure crises are largely a product of a backwards construction industry—and things won’t get better until we bring it into the 21st century.
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