We were inspired to write this book by the pioneering works of Hiram S. Davis and John W. Kendrick. Davis, a staff member and Director of the Industrial Research Unit in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on prices, wages, and industrial relations, and more extensively on productivity. His work on productivity influenced Kendrick, the foremost productivity expert of our time (and also a reviewer of the prospectus for this book), and Kendrick in turn has influenced a generation of productivity scholars.

Both writers were concerned with productivity growth at the aggregate level.

In The Industrial Study of Economic Progress, the first of two books devoted to productivity, Davis proposed to investigate productivity at the industry level, and was equally concerned with the sources, both internal and external, of productivity growth and the sharing of the benefits that productivity growth conferred. He claimed that productivity growth constituted one, but not the sole, driver of “economic progress,” which is more far-reaching than the more popular concepts of real income or real income per capita. Economic progress also depends on a distribution of the productivity gains in which all members of society benefit, and the ability to address the labor displacement and social costs of industrial development that productivity growth generates.