Portal:Business/Selected quote/107
"It is not labor, not capital, not land, that has created modern wealth or is creating it today. It is ideas that create wealth, and what is wanted is more ideas more uncovering of natural reservoirs, and less labor and capital and land per unit of production. Gold has very little intrinsic value, diamonds have none except to cut glass and stone. It is a thought, a sentiment, that gives value to gold and diamonds; it was the invention of the incandescent lamp that doubled the value of platinum. Columbus with his idea of land to the west, Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, with their ideas of liberty, Jefferson with his idea of territorial expansion, Fulton with his idea of the steamboat, Stephenson with his creation of the locomotive and track; it was Howe, Morse, Edison, Westinghouse, Bell and Gray, Marconi; it was Lincoln, it was Rockefeller, Carnegie, J. J. Hill and Harriman with their ideas, it was Roosevelt with the Panama Canal, that have made the United States what it is. All these men used labor and capital to uncover and develop the hitherto unutilized resources of the universe.
The Dutch and the Huguenots settled in South Africa about the same time North America above the gulf was colonized. The United States grew on account of ideas; South Africa remained undeveloped because of paucity of ideas, paucity of energy. The blacks had to do the work. There was no use for steam engines.
Muscular effort can be stimulated by the lash intelligent supervision, intellectual production, never! One single idea may have greater value than all the labor of all the men, animals, and engines for a century. The age of muscular human effort and of the lash is passing away, and the old morality with it; the age of supervision, of co-operative stimulus, is in full advance; and with it comes a new morality, under which the Golden Rule can be extended from the relations between individuals to those between classes, nationalities, and races. The highest official cannot dictate to the youngest apprenticed worker. Both are creatures of the machine, but both in turn must serve it, for unless its every law and need is lived up to, it will refuse to work efficiently, often reuse to work at all. With these new duties and privileges of men toward each other old truths become fallacies and paradoxes become the basic truths of tomorrow.
To forward the new morality, to extend the dominion of man over uncarnate energy and its use, to substitute highly paid thinkers and supervisors for devitalized toilers, to help each individual, each corporation, each government to meet its part of the obligation, above all to inspire those executives on whose skill all progress and all wise performance depends, is the justification of these essays."
- —Harrington Emerson, The twelve principles of efficiency, 1924