NOBODY WORKS ALONE

Just as it takes a nation to keep a well-equipped soldier in the field, there is a whole industrial army behind every guy who swings a hammer, supplying him with all he needs, from lumber and nails, to blueprints and boots. 


The quality of his work is the sole purpose, and the whole point, so far, of a complex network of logistics trains, all working towards the same ultimate end. All the parts have to be right. Not just his hammer, not just his lumber. 


I offer three apparently unrelated examples: footwear, raw materials and engineering.

Boots uncomfortable? Slow job. 
Bad nails? Bad job. 
Inaccurate blueprints? Expensive job.

Despite the initial bookkeeping, the cost for any of these failures is spread out amongst the players, and then slowly across the entire economy. Not immediately or evenly, perhaps, but ultimately all these costs are distributed.

The bad boots costs him sore feet, they cost his wife a grumpy husband, and they cost his kids a hike with Dad. They cost his boss overtime and profits. They cost the manufacturer future sales and your sister has her hours cut at the boot factory. Her friend is laid off, she doesn't buy that new car. 

The bad nails cost him aggravation (and maybe a sore thumb) and his boss overtime and profits, or if they pass undetected, they cost his customer, and his tenants, and their customers, and their families, when the structure fails prematurely. Not only does the cost spread, it increases. This is the multiplier effect at its hairiest.

The blueprint error costs everyone who relied upon it except the guy with the hammer (who, entrusted with finding and fixing it, is paid to rework it at least once), and is therefor disputed by the various insurers and litigated for years.

Whoever loses, the cost of any problem (along with the legal overhead required to argue it) is ultimately added not just to the cost of the particular job, it is also added to the price of future transactions, in the form of higher wage and benefit costs, capital costs, insurance rates, bond requirements, fees raised, rents charged and price tag jumps. 


These new price levels instantly become the new price floors, so over time, mistakes drive up the cost of just doing business in general. Prices must rise merely to maintain existing margins. Mistakes are therefor inflationary by their very nature.

 So you see it is critically important that every seemingly unrelated task is sufficiently incentivized to ensure quality work-product, for some may be working by themselves, but nobody really works alone.