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THE ORIGINS OF EFFICIENCY
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The Age of the Amplifier
As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.
Mar 27
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Brian Potter
176
8
7
How Much Computing Power is in a Data Center?
Every day there’s some new story about the enormous amounts of investment in building AI data centers.
Mar 19
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Brian Potter
149
18
5
The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home
It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally…
Mar 12
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Brian Potter
165
58
12
A History of Operation Breakthrough
Many who look at the high and rising cost of housing see the problem as fundamentally one of production methods; more specifically, that homes could be…
Mar 6
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Brian Potter
141
35
6
Is the Future “AWS for Everything”?
A theme running through my book is the idea that efficiency improvements, and the various methods for making products cheaper over time, have…
Feb 19
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Brian Potter
185
30
13
Trends in US Construction Productivity
(This is a chapter of a longer report I’m working on that summarizes and expands the last several years of my work on construction productivity.
Feb 12
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Brian Potter
90
19
8
Do Commodities Get Cheaper Over Time?
This American Enterprise Institute chart, which breaks down how price changes for different types of goods and services in the consumer price index, has…
Jan 22
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Brian Potter
131
42
14
The Surprisingly Long Life of the Vacuum Tube
The last several decades of technological progress have, in large part, been about finding more and more things we can do with semiconductors and the…
Jan 15
•
Brian Potter
134
26
10
How Did TVs Get So Cheap?
You’ve probably seen this famous graph that breaks out various categories of inflation, showing labor-intensive services getting more expensive during…
Jan 8
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Brian Potter
203
30
16
Should US homebuilders emulate Sweden?
A common sentiment I see with folks interested in improving US homebuilding is that we should try and emulate Sweden.
Jan 1
•
Brian Potter
143
83
8
How Accurate Are Learning Curves?
We’ve talked several times on this substack (as well as in my book), about the learning curve, the observation that costs of a produced good tend to…
Dec 24, 2025
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Brian Potter
102
21
7
How Bell Labs Won Its First Nobel Prize
Bell Labs, as we’ve noted before, was for years America’s premier industrial research lab.
Dec 18, 2025
•
Brian Potter
129
13
11
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