Indeed, the idea of a projected lower bound that proposed investment projects should attain in increased output or improved work conditions per investment required is part of the information on the national production facilitation board would provide. Wherever workers are considering changes in work organization or new technologies, differences in inputs, outputs, and work quality would need to be assessed. Obviously, any proposal that improves work quality with no loss in outputs and no investment expense would be noncontroversial since it would improve the national work complex average at no cost. However, whenever investment is necessary to improve work complexes or increase output there must be some way to decide which investments would be sufficiently beneficial to undertake. The national production facilitation board, by estimating per capita growth and anticipated change in the average work complex, provides an initial and regularly updated estimate of the minimal returns needed from investments to make them desirable.
All workers have access to computers on which they can make calculations and comparisons.
Returning to our example, after consulting projections, Nancy decides to develop her first proposal for Northstart based on implementing investment plan three. Nancy must next decide on a level of output-how many titles to publish in the coming year. She could just accept facilitation board suggestions. Or, considering data on population growth, industry IFB predictions of likely growth in numbers of titles desired and in average readership per title, and her own perceptions of people's changing tastes in reading, Nancy could decide industry predictions are a bit too modest and settles on a first proposal to increase titles published by 3.5 percent rather than the IFB projected 3.3 percent, and of readers 1.2 percent instead of the IFB projected 1. 1 percent. To translate her estimates into a full proposal for Northstart, Nancy next settles on number of employees, hours of work per day, and effort levels at Northstart.