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This week, continuing in the vein of some of our previous strategy and military theory primers, I wanted to off a basic 101-level survey of the strategic theory behind efforts, in a sense, directed against the state itself, both violent approaches (what we might call ‘terroristic insurgency’)¹ and non-violent approaches (protest). It may seem strange to treat violent insurgency and non-violent protest together but while they employ very different methods, as we’ll see, they share a similar theoretical framework, attempting to achieve some of the similar effects by different means, both working within the state, against the state (or its policies), focused on the changing minds rather than battlefields.

Naturally this comes in part in response to the significant amounts of protest actions happening right now in the United States, but the framework here is very much intended to be a general one, applicable to both armed insurgencies and non-violent protests worldwide. The world, after all, is really quite big and there are multiple major protest movements and multiple armed insurgencies happening globally at any given time. That said, much as with protracted war, a movement aiming to push against the state is naturally going to be heavily shaped by local conditions, particularly by the nature of the state against which it sets itself as well as the condition and political alignment of its people.

Finally, I want to clarify how I am using terminology here at the outset. I have mostly stuck here to ‘insurgent’ to describe violent actors opposing the state and ‘protestor’ to describe non-violent ones. Obviously in mass movements, violence is not a binary but a spectrum – a single fellow kicking over a trash can does not turn a non-violent march into a riot, but equally having a ‘political wing’ does not turn an organization mounting a terror campaign ‘non-violent.’ However the strategic dichotomy is going to be useful to understanding how these groups in their ideal form tackle problems. Likewise, I am going to describe the violent movements opposing the state as ‘insurgencies’ but I want to note at the outset that I am drawing a distinction here between what I am defining as ‘insurgencies’ which lack the backing of a conventional army or the expectation of soon acquiring one, as opposed to forces in a protracted war framework who have or expect to have the backing of a conventional force, however weak (we might call the latter group guerillas, although this too is imprecise). The line between these two strategies is certainly fuzzy – many insurgencies hope to eventually transition to protracted war and the two approaches share many tactics – but there are worthwhile differences between the two.

In particular, whereas the guerilla’s cause is supported by a conventional army – even if it is in hiding – and anticipates a shift to positional, conventional warfare and thus eventual victory on the battlefield (however distance), the insurgent has no expectation of developing a conventional force capable of meeting his opponent any time soon and is instead wholly focused on the ‘war in the mind,’ often through the use of terror tactics. That said, I mostly avoid ‘terrorist’ here as well, in an effort to avoid the ‘our freedom fighter is their terrorist’ problem of morally loaded language in order to focus on tactics and strategic effects, rather than the rightness or wrongness of the cause. And I should be clear here, what follows – despite being almost 11,000 words long – is very much a schematic overview into which a great amount of detail and nuance could (and probably ought) to be added, still I think the theory foundation here might be useful.

At the end, once we have our theory out, I am going to make a few observations about the current immigration policy anti-ICE protests in the United States generally and in Minneapolis-Saint Paul in particular and how I think they fit in to this framework.

(Bibliography Note: The difficulty in writing this kind of a framework is that much of what is written in terrorism and insurgency is written primarily from the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency (COIN) perspective. Nevertheless, to the degree these works understand their enemies, they are useful. The standard teaching works for understanding counter-insurgency warfare are typically campaign histories of successful and failed COIN operations, such as J.A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2005); note also older and influential efforts such as B.B. Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina (1961), D. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (1964) and A. Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (1977) . The United States military’s understanding of these lessons is distilled in a field manual, FM 3-24, albeit hardly one without criticisms. For the references here to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan (2001-2021), many of my observations are drawn specifically from W. Morgan, The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley (2021), which I cannot recommend strongly enough. Though it is hardly a perfect book, I also reference here Max Boot, Invisible Armies (2013) specifically for its discussion of the failure rate of insurgencies. In terms of framing these campaign histories, I lean here quite hard on the framework used by W.E. Lee in Waging War (2015) which was the textbook I taught this topic from when I taught a global survey of warfare. On the strategy of non-violence, what I would without question recommend first is T.E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968 (2022). Also note the strategic thinking of non-violent leaders; Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963) is a remarkably cogent and clear explication of non-violence as a strategy in both its goals and how it was specifically framed for one such campaign. I am not an expert on Gandhi’s writings – which are voluminous – but I did read through the selections in Gandhi on Non-Violence, ed. T. Merton (1964). I am sure a scholar of his writings could do far better; I feel my insufficiency on this topic keenly. Finally, in terms of theory, this post uses as its theoretical foundation a mix of Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Krieg (1832) – I generally use the Howard and Paret translation, though no translation is perfect – and Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970).)

(Header image: from left to right, all via Wikipedia: Taliban fighters in 2021, a car-bombing in Iraq in 2005, a non-violent student sit-in in North Carolina in 1960 and an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis, January 2026.)

Establishing a Framework

Before we dive in to the differences between insurgencies and protest movements, we have to establish their common framework and before we do that we need to establish some terms and for that we will need to rely quite a bit on Carl von Clausewitz, so get your beer mug, wine glass or drinking horn ready.

The starting point for understanding how both insurgencies and protests work is the Clausewitzian trinity. This is, in and of itself, something of an odd statement because Clausewitz, in writing On War (1832) was not focused on either insurgencies or non-violent protest movements but rather on conventional, large-scale interstate war of the sort that he had known. But the framework he constructed to understand the nature of war is so fundamental that it applies effectively to forms of conflict beyond the kinds of war he knew and indeed beyond the activity of war to some significant degree and so it is very useful here.

Via Wikipedia, Carl von Clausewitz. For those playing the Clausewitz drinking game: prepare to get *absolutely* hammered.

To very briefly summarize, Clausewitz begins by noting that war, by its nature, tends to escalate infinitely, each side of a conflict applying more and more force against the other until one side ‘runs out.’ Infinite escalate is an inextricable part of war’s core nature in the ideal. The two sides to a conflict thus increasingly commit their strength until one side can escalate no further – it has no more strength to apply – and thus fails, leading the stronger party in a position to impose their will upon the weaker. But of course in the real world this infinite escalation is restrained by real world factors, which Clausewitz breaks into three. It is these three factors that restrain (or in some cases, enhance) the escalating use of force that are the Clausewitzian trinity we so often talk about. They are:

Friction, the expression of randomness and unpredictability in war, encompassing all of the sorts of things that keep a state from having its full military force where it wants them to be, when it wants them to be there, functioning as intended. Bad weather, logistics snarls, unpredictable human with their emotions, unexpected enemy action – these are all forms of friction. The management of friction – management, not elimination, because it cannot be eliminated – is in Clausewitz view the proper occupation of generals, who apply their genius (natural talent) to it. And of course some actions and methods in war are also designed to increase an enemy’s friction – think something like supply disruption.

Next is Will, sometimes also termed Passion (translating Clausewitz is fun), which is to say the dedication of the people (or at least, the militarily or politically relevant people) to a cause. Clausewitz came up during the Napoleonic Wars, an age of mass warfare, so he thinks about this in terms of mass mobilization and for this post we should too. As such, Will resides with the People and is a product of their emotions, with the willingness of the great bulk of the society to submit to the hardships of a conflict in order to carry on the cause. High amounts of Will enables more escalation because a people will sacrifice more to carry on; flagging Will equally enforces limits on escalation.

Finally there is the political object, the actual aim of the conflict, the goal each side has. A state seeking an objective that is small or trivial or optional is going to be unwilling to spend its full strength in the pursuit of that objective. By contrast, a state whose entire existence is threatened will deploy everything it possibly can. In Clausewitz’ view the political object is managed by politicians, who do (or at least ought) to govern state strategy and the willingness of the state to expend resources by calculations of pure reason.

With these three elements in mind, it becomes possible to overcome an enemy (or to be overcome) without matching their maximum possible strength ‘in the ideal.’ A weak state, for instance, might hold off a stronger one simply because the thing being contested is much more important (the political object!) to them and so they apply a greater portion of their strength. Alternately, weak public support might prevent a strong state from mobilizing its full potential force or friction – perhaps a tricky supply situation at great distance with unpredictable conditions – might prevent the full application of that larger state’s force.

These three elements of the trinity are equally variables, which either side might seek to effect: to sap enemy will so as to limit the force they can mobilize or to structure political conditions so that attacking even a weaker neighbor is simply not worth the cost. In this latter point, this is how nuclear deterrence works: it raises the cost of a conventional war well above any possible gains, so that even a stronger state would profit nothing from attacking and so does not attack.

You may now stop chugging your drink (but have some handy, we’re not done with our good friend Clausewitz just yet).

For a weaker party in a conflict, altering these variables is of course essential: if you are the weaker party then by definition you are not in a position to win the ‘ideal’ trial of strength (which to be clear, never exists in the real world; it is only an ideal construct) in any case and so must seek ways to use the elements of the trinity as ‘levers’ to constrain your opponent’s ability to employ their strength, while keeping yours unconstrained.

And at last that is the key to understanding insurgencies and protests movements, because both insurgencies and protest movements take the form they do because from a perspective of pure force, they are the weakest parties compared to the violent power of the state, whichever state they might find themselves pitted against.

Theories of Victory

Fundamentally, what protests, insurgencies and terrorism campaigns have in common is that neither operates with any hope of directly challenging the armed force of the state. You may note this is a significant contrast to the theory of protracted war: while protracted war is a strategy of the weak against the strong, it envisions a future transition to a phase (or even phases) of direct, conventional ‘positional’ warfare, once the strength of the opposing power has been sapped. A force engaged in protracted war expects to win on the battlefield eventually, just not today. By contrast, while armed insurgencies often adopt a protracted war theory and thus a notional stage where they transition to conventional warfare, they often operate much farther from making that a reality.

Now I am to a degree defining this distinction between insurgency and protracted war – many of the parties involve understand themselves to be practicing both – but I think the distinction is important. A contrast may serve. The forces of North Vietnam (and their sympathizers in the South) waged a protracted war against the United States and the U.S. supported South Vietnamese government in which they were clearly in conventional terms the weaker partner, but at all points in that conflict, North Vietnam maintained a conventional military (the People’s Army of Vietnam or PAVN) engaging in a level of conventional warfare. That included major efforts to transition to direct, positional and conventional warfare in 1964 and again in 1968 and again in 1972 (being badly hammered each time). Practitioners of protracted war – we may, for the sake of simplicity here (if at the cost of some accuracy) call them guerillas – often engage in terrorist or insurgent tactics, but their overarching strategic theory assumes an eventual transition to conventional warfare.

By way of contrasting example, the insurgencies the United States faced in Afghanistan (alongside NATO allies) and in Iraq (alongside coalition allies) never seem to have seriously contemplated engaging the United States military in a conventional battle. Not only was the balance of forces extremely unfavorable, these groups had no real plan to make it favorable. This comes into really sharp relief if you think about airpower – without which engaging in a conventional groundfight against a modern military is simply high-tech suicide. North Vietnam, equipped by its allies, operated one of the most sophisticated air defense systems in the region and regularly inflicted air-to-air loses on United States pilots; they shot down thousands of planes. By contrast, the sum total of American fixed-wing aircraft combat losses in the air in Iraq and Afghanistan 2001-2021 consisted of a single A-10A Thunderbolt II.² Accidents and maintenance issues claimed aircraft far more often than enemy action. At no point, so far as I can tell, did Iraqi or Taliban insurgents make a serious effort to challenge American airpower because unlike the North Vietnamese, it was never required to do so for their theory of victory.

Via Wikipedia (who in turn got the screenshot from Voice of America), a group of Taliban fighters in 2021 in Kabul. You may note the lack of heavy weapons or militarized vehicles: these militants were never going to defeat the United States military in an open battle, nor did they plan to.

Fundamentally insurgencies lack access to substantial amounts of industrial firepower (typically because they have no foreign sponsor willing to hand them modern heavy weaponry; small arms are neat but to wage modern conventional warfare, you need armor, artillery and airpower) and so while they try to achieve their aims through violence, they operate with no hope of directly challenging an opposing force that does have access to industrial firepower. That demands a different approach!

There is thus, I’d argue, a real difference between a weaker force which still aims for and has a practical plan to actually defeat an enemy force – in the above example, to shoot down their planes – as opposed to an insurgency that needs an enemy it cannot defeat to give up or go away.

Of course for a non-violent protest movement, this differential in armed force becomes essentially infinite: such movements bring no armed force at all to the table. And yet non-violence has arguably a better track record than insurgency at achieving its goals. How?

Fundamentally, these groups focus almost entirely on Will. Whereas the force of modern states comes from the ability to harness industrial firepower and is thus a product of economies, the endurance of an insurgency or protest movement derives almost purely from their ability to secure new recruits faster than they are exhausted, which in turn is a product of popular support and internal morale – which is, of course, just that Clausewitzian Will in action. So long as that will remains strong, these groups will aquire new recruits faster than the state can arrest or kill them and so they will grow. And since the weapons (or ‘weapons’ in the case of protest groups) the group is using do not demand an independent industrial base – they’re available commercially for prices individuals or small groups can afford, legally or otherwise – there is no industrial base, no core territory full of factories or warehouses to attack. So long as will remains, the group remains and can continue to advance their agenda.

Which would not add up to very much if insurgent or protest groups had no hope of actually achieving their aims – indeed, it would be very hard to sustain their own Will if that were the case – but of course these groups often succeed. The answer relies on understanding the Clausewitzian trinity as a tool (drink!): if the insurgency or protest movement cannot escalate to match the force of the state, it must use the levers the trinity provides to de-escalate the force of the state. In part this is done through the political object – by raising the cost of denying the insurgency or protest group’s demands until it the rational calculus is simply to give them what they want. That in turn is generally accomplished through degrading popular will, until the costs to the opposing state – in public support, in votes, in public compliance – either lead to capitulation to some or all of the demands or to regime collapse.

Both protests and insurgencies function this way, where the true battlefield is the will of the participants, rather than contesting control over physical space. That’s a tricky thing, however, for humans to wrap our heads around. We have, after all, spent many thousands of years – arguably the whole of our history and pre-history, largely fighting battles over territory. Our emotions are tuned for those kinds of fights and so our instinct is to revert to that style of fighting. One can see this very clearly in young or undisciplined protestors who imagine they will ‘win’ the protest by forcing back a police line, essentially ‘battling’ the cops. But protest groups do not ‘win’ by beating the police into submission and indeed even armed insurgencies generally do not win by victories in open fights.

In both cases, these movements win by preserving (or fostering) their own will to fight, while degrading the enemy’s will to fight.

Of course they use very different tactics to achieve that same goal.

The Tactics of Insurgency

Of course to begin with, as a product of the definitions we’re working with here, insurgents and terrorists use violent means to achieve their ends. But whereas one conventional army engages another with the intent of destroying it, we might say that the insurgent or terrorist instead engages in violence with the intent to communicate a message.

That is going to seem like a very odd statement, so let me explain.

The strategic effect the insurgent aims to achieve is not located in his target. Remember, we’re talking about violent movements that have no real hope in the foreseeable future of actually destroying the armed forces of their enemy, so while they may spend a lot of time blowing things up, they cannot win purely by blowing things up. Instead, they seek to persuade key audiences by violence as an alternative to the destruction of the enemy (of which they are incapable). So they stage attacks, destroying targets, to communicate their message to persuade those audiences. The precise framing of the messages may vary, but (and here I am following Lee, op. cit.), there is a standard set of audiences and messages the group wants to convey:

To its own members, the insurgency needs to communicate that the group is active and making progress in order to sustain its own will. Inflicting casualties – often in spectacular, filmed and documented fashion – on real or perceived enemies can accomplish this, hardening the group member’s resolve to continue (and to sustain casualties).
To potential members, the insurgency needs to communicate this same effectiveness, because it will take substantially losses, often much higher losses than the enemy. As a result, it needs a steady stream of young, angry and motivated recruits. The very inexhaustible nature of its recruitment is a key element of messaging to enemies (see below).
To potential supporters of the enemy (which might be locals collaborating with an occupation government or civilians acting in support of a regime) the insurgency needs to communicate that it can inflict violence on enemy supporters and also that it will inevitably win. Essentially the message being communicated is, “if you support our enemies, we will eventually win and then kill you and your family.” The aim is to terrify opponents into passive acceptance of the insurgency, rather than active opposition.
To the enemy itself, the insurgency aims to communicate its continued existence and ability to extract continued costs. The message is, in effect, ‘give up, we’re not going away.’ That message can be directed at leaders, but equally at rank and file members of the opposition, encouraging them to ‘melt away’ rather than endure year after year after year of fear and hardship combating the insurgency.

There is, it must be noted, a distinction here between two kinds of terror or insurgency aims: those that target primarily their own (independent) state and those attempting to expel the forces of another state (some kind of occupation or imperial government). In the former case, where the enemy leadership has nowhere else to go, the sense of inevitability the insurgency has to build is considerable in order to get supporters of the regime to abandon it completely, whereas by contrast encouraging an occupying force to leave is far easier: only the high cost and intractability of the insurgency – its inability to be destroyed rather than the inevitability of its success – may be required to make a foreign power decide that occupation is simply no longer worth it. Unsurprisingly, then, insurgency campaigns have significantly higher success rates against foreign occupying forces or foreign-supported occupation governments (and indeed, as Max Boot, op. cit. notes, the success rates for insurgencies generally and against independent indigenous governments specifically is abysmal; insurgents usually lose).

It may be easier to understand these strategic aims in the context of the concrete actions insurgents take to further them. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2021 can serve as a ‘model’ for how many of these functions work. By 2002, there was little question of the Taliban directly opposing the military forces of the United States and its coalition partners: they had been roundly and comprehensively defeated, pushed into small cells or mountain hideouts, with no conventional military force to speak of.

The most visible actions by the insurgency are what we might term ‘spectacular attacks’ – spectacular in every sense of the word because these are spectacles intended for spectators. This is the propaganda of the deed, the defining feature of terrorism, where through an act of spectacular violence, often (but not always) against civilians, a group aims to garner attention and support for its core message. In the context of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the 2009 car bombing of the NATO HQ in Afghanistan serves as an example, as did the release of video of the captured Bowe Bergdahl the same year (of course the 9/11 attacks that started the conflict are also an example), alongside many others. Sometimes these attacks are focused on military targets, but as frequently not – what we are focused on here is that the attack’s primary role is messaging rather than direct military utility. What we need to understand about these attacks is that they are not expected to bring about military victory directly: they do not seriously endanger the military force of the insurgent’s opponent. Instead, they are exercises in messaging, which is why their spectacular nature is important, indeed central: they are intended to get news coverage, to be discussed and talked about and thus create a platform for the insurgent to spread his message: to supporters that the insurgency still exists and is ‘making progress’ and inflicting pain on the enemy (and thus worthy of support) and to the opposing force that the insurgency still exists and is capable of inflicting costs (and thus, perhaps you should just go away and give them what they want).

But while foreign media coverage often focuses on these larger spectacular attacks – they are designed to attract such coverage – insurgents are often doing a lot more less well-covered things. Core to the Taliban’s success was not attacks on United States forces but assassinations and a campaign of terror among Afghans who might support or collaborate with United States forces. The messaging in this case was very deliberate: that at some point the Americans would leave and the Taliban would remain at which point those who continued to work with the United States or the Afghan government it had supported would be killed (frequently along with their families). Note that while this message ended up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in Afghanistan, that is not always true: Iraqi insurgents did the same kind of messaging, but AQI/ISIS has been very greatly reduced, while the government set up by the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq remains. Insurgents do not always succeed in their aims.

The campaign of terror, targeting local leaders and officials, police officers, and the US-friendly Afghanistan National Army, was always far more extensive in Afghanistan than direct Taliban actions against the direct American presence. Including civilian contractors, US and coalition deaths in Afghanistan numbered 7,423, but Afghan security forces suffered more than 65,000 KIA; estimates for Afghan civilian deaths at the hands of the Taliban are fuzzy at best but well into the tens of thousands. While Taliban insurgents certainly engaged in propaganda and leveraged sympathetic local leaders and networks to build their base of support among the populace, the ‘hard edge’ of this strategy was a clear willingness to ‘make a demonstration’ of local non-sympathizer Afghans through (locally) spectacular assassinations. Once again the goal was not to kill every person who supported the U.S. backed government but to, by very visibly assassinating a few, frighten the remainder into withdrawing their support, which steadily rotted away the foundations of the Afghanistan security forces.

There is also an element of friction in this kind of insurgency: after all, the insurgent is opposed. Generally in a counter-insurgency context, the powerful conventional military is attempting to set up governance, to convert its superiority of armed force into power (in Hannah Arendt’s sense), that is the more-or-less voluntary cooperation of the local populace. Those forces are trying to set up local police forces, courts, governments, services, schools, roads and so on in order to enable a civilian administration which can organize and govern the populace.³ Even if the insurgency is not ideologically opposed to some of these administrative structures (and they often are; the Taliban was very opposed to efforts to educate women, for instance), they want to prevent or slow their emergence because effective local governing structures drain away the disorganized or supportive human terrain the insurgency needs to function. Countries with well-organized, locally supported police forces are extremely difficult terrain for any insurgency to operate in. And at the same time, once they realize they are in a counter-insurgency framework, the conventional force is likely to begin attempting to hunt insurgents, which is also something the insurgent wants to avoid.

Consequently, insurgents also engage in small-scale attacks on local security forces, with a twin purpose. On the one hand, inflicting casualties, especially on a occupying force, can serve to erode the will of the distant public (informed about these losses by their media) to continue the struggle. Such attacks thus serve as messaging to that public. They they also serve to raise friction (in the Clausewitzian sense, keep drinking) making it harder for the conventional force to leverage its superiority in firepower and materiel. The near perpetual threat of Taliban ambush in large parts of Afghanistan outside of the major cities substantially limited the mobility of coalition forces, limited their ability to patrol and provide security, to supply distant bases, or to set up and maintain services, thus slowing down and eventually reversing progress at setting up a functioning civilian administration in the countryside, which was the one thing that might have actually successfully rooted out the Taliban in the long-term (by eventually transforming a war of insurgency into simply a question of crime, controlled by police and local officials robustly supported by the local populace).

However the theory of victory is not based on friction: the insurgent can delay the conventional force, but it cannot by force stop them completely. Instead, the theory of victory is focused on will and to a lesser extent the political object. An insurgency could plausibly succeed by simply raising the cost of an operation (like an occupation) higher than anticipated gains, causing a rational political leadership to pull the plug. In practice, political leadership rarely wants to admit failure so easily and states will pursue failing strategies for a long time simply to avoid the perception of defeat. Consequently the more common mechanism for successful insurgencies is that the erosion of will, of public support, compels political authorities to accede to some or all of the demands of the insurgents. The ‘center of gravity’ – the locus of the most important strategic objective – for most insurgencies thus often becomes the political support that sustains a government, be that a body of key supporters in non-democratic regimes or the voters in democratic ones. That body of key voters or supporters, of course, is often not even located in the theater of operations at all: the Taliban ultimately won their insurgency in Afghanistan because they persuaded American voters that the war was no longer worth the cost, leading to the election of leaders promising to pull the plug on the war.

This is a remarkably slow process, eroding public will: indeed, the very apparent inexhaustibility of an insurgent force is part of its messaging, that no matter how many fighters the conventional army kills, there are always more replacements and so the violence – the costs – never stop. Meanwhile hunting down insurgent groups catches a conventional force on the ‘horns of a dilemma’. Modern conventional armies are built for tremendous destructive firepower, but the insurgents often hide among supportive (or terrorized) populations. If the conventional force does nothing, the insurgency will grow without check, but if the conventional force tries to engage the insurgents, they run the risk of producing a lot of collateral damage. For insurgent forces – who are often ideologically unconcerned with civilian casualties – this can be turned to their advantage, using the small strikes they are capable of to bait the Big Conventional Army into attempting to leverage its massive firepower, with the collateral damage that results essentially producing a ‘spectacular attack’ for the insurgents when the local civilian population is caught in the blast radius. It is striking, reading something like The Hardest Place how some of the most damaging attacks for American forces in the Pech Valley were not Taliban attacks, but American attacks attempting to hit the Taliban that, through carelessness, excessive force or simply the fog of war, caused civilian casualties that poisoned any goodwill from the local populace.

This isn’t the place to discuss counter-insurgency warfare in depth here, but this problem is why the consensus is that COIN is best done with lots of infantry providing local security and relatively little in the way of airpower (though air mobility is useful) or heavy firepower. Of course, long, infantry-heavy deployments of large numbers of soldiers are both unpopular on their own and also produce higher rates of casualties among the Big Conventional Army. That in turn can sap public will to continue – especially in the case of wars against distant, foreign insurgencies – and thus make things unpopular for politicians, which is, in part, why governments keep trying to go back to counter-insurgency-by-guided-bomb, a strategy which quite evidently does not work well in the absence of ground forces.

However anyone using terror tactics – that is, the targeting of the defenseless for the purpose of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ – of all kinds and thus terroristic-insurgents are caught on the horns of their own dilemma. Remember: the attacks they are engaged in are not sufficient in themselves to produce victory or even meaningfully advance towards it. As a raw matter of manpower and resources, the United States could have sustained the fiscal and human cost of the Afghanistan War forever. Instead, the terroristic-insurgent’s attacks only work when they impact Will (keep drinking), which means they only work when they gain a wider audience, when they gain attention. In some cases that attention is local but in many cases a broad audience of supporters (potential recruits) and opponents is intended.

To get an audience, such attacks must get coverage, they have to draw attention. And what draws attention to these attacks is their spectacular nature: that they are particularly violent, particularly gruesome, that they strike a population (civilians, women, children) normally considered exempt from violence or occur in places (cities, religious or cultural sites) understood to be outside of the war zone. But of course the more spectacular the violence the greater the possibility of a ‘backfire’ of sorts, where the very violence and barbarity that the insurgent is driving in order to get that attention to attract those recruits, to demoralize their enemies, instead convinces their opponents that the insurgency is a dire threat which must be defeated at all costs.

Many insurgencies end up gored on the horns of this dilemma, some multiple times. Indeed, this is what happened to AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq), twice. In 2005, AQI violence alienated key tribal leaders in Iraq’s Al Anbar governate, leading to the ‘Anbar Awakening’ where some of those key leaders forged alliances with local coalition forces: shorn of local support and thus the ‘cover’ the population provided and opposed both by coalition forces and local militias, AQI lost footholds in key cities like Ramadi and Fallujah. AQI would go on to rebrand as the Islamic State (Daesch/IS/ISIL/ISIS), rebuilding itself in the context of the Syrian Civil War and then exploding outward in 2013 and 2014. The Islamic State likewise followed a policy of spectacular violence, which garnered it a lot of attention and a lot of recruits, but also produced both a domestic backlash in Iraq and Syria and a foreign backlash, leading to the emergence of a broad anti-IS coalition that by 2016 had destroyed the core of the organization, although various international ‘franchises’ continue to exist. Similarly, of course, the 9/11 attacks on the one hand brought the perpetrators, Al Qaeda (the original) tremendous attention – and an extended anti-terror campaign that has left nearly all of their senior leadership dead and much of the organization shattered. The Taliban may have survived the wrath of the United States, but relatively little of Al Qaeda did.⁴

And this dilemma actually leads us neatly into the mirror-image of a terrorist insurgency: non-violent movements.

The Tactics of Non-Violence

Non-violence is a strategy.

I think that is important to outline here at the beginning, because there is a tendency in the broader culture to read non-violence purely as a moral position, as an unwillingness to engage in violence. And to be fair, proponents of non-violence often stress its moral superiority – in statements and publications which are themselves strategic – and frequently broader social conversations which would prefer not to engage with the strategic nature of protest, preferring instead impotent secular saints, often latch on to those statements. But the adoption of non-violent approaches is a strategic choice made because non-violence offers, in the correct circumstances substantial advantages as a strategy (as well as being, when it is possible, a morally superior approach).

If we boil down the previous section on insurgencies, what we see is that the insurgent wages his ‘attack on will’ through a prolonged campaign of (violent) disruption, often relying on his opponent (the state) to supply the morally uncomplicated spectacular violence by overreacting to his (violent) disruption. I stress disruption here because again, the terroristic insurgent does not expect to car-bomb his way to victory (because he has nowhere near enough car bombs or he’d be waging a different kind of struggle), he expects to car-bomb his way to popular support or at least to the withdrawal of popular support from his opponent. One key way to accelerate that process is to use the car-bombs to bait the authorities into a damaging overreaction. But equally, the peril the terroristic insurgent runs is that his car-bombs will alienate his own support (car-bombs are not popular) faster than it erodes the will of his enemy.

Now to my knowledge no advocate of non-violence has ever expressed their approach this way, but for the sake of understanding it, we could put it like this: under the right conditions, a non-violent strategy resolves the dilemma by retaining the ‘attack on will’ strategy and simply dispensing with the potentially supporter-alienating violence (the car bombs), by in turn exploiting the overreaction of the state.

To simplify greatly, the strategy of non-violence aims first to cause disruption (non-violently) in order both to draw attention but also in order to bait state overreaction. The state’s overreaction then becomes the ‘spectacular attack’ which broadcasts the movement’s message, while the group’s willingness to endure that overreaction without violence not only avoids alienating supporters, it heightens the contrast between the unjust state and the just movement. That reaction maintains support for the movement, but at the same time disruption does not stop: the movements growing popularity enable new recruits to replace those arrested (just as with insurgent recruitment) rendering the state incapable of restoring order. The state’s supporters may grow to sympathize with the movement, but at the very least they grow impatient with the disruption, which as you will recall refuses to stop. As support for state repression of the movement declines (because repression is not stopping the disruption) and the movement itself proves impossible to extinguish (because repression is recruiting for it), the only viable solution becomes giving the movement its demands.

It is the same essential framework – create a disruption to draw attention and fatigue the opponent, use the attention to draw recruits to replace losses to sustain the disruption indefinitely until opposing will fails – as the insurgent, but delivered without violence.

We can see this basic framework in action in each of the Civil Rights Movements’ campaigns, applied both to each campaign individually and also to the whole movement. Let’s take the Nashville Campaign of 1960 as an example.⁵ The aim, formulated by James Lawson and drawing on Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence, was to draw national attention to the evils of segregation (the big picture strategic aim) and begin desegregation in Nashville (the campaign’s specific aim). The campaign was preceded by a significant period of training beginning in 1958 because far from being a weak or cowardly strategy, non-violence demands remarkable discipline. In late 1959, Lawson sent out what were effectively scouting parties to determine the reaction they would get from disruptions at specific locations.

Via Wikipedia, a photograph of white onlookers attacking protestor Paul Laprad during the Nashville sit-ins in 1960.

The planned disruption was a series of sit-ins at lunch counters in downtown Nashville, which were at the time segregated. This would create real disruption and it had to: if there’s no disruption, then no attention is gained and the state does not respond. But the sit-ins would both demonstrate the unfairness of segregation in these stores, while at the same time the backlash against the sit-ins – hecklers, arrests – disrupted the stores’ business, in turn motivating more state reaction. The sit-ins began on February 13th, 1960, drawing angry crowds of pro-segregationist whites and disrupting business but also drawing attention and thus new recruits to the effort. As the effort thus expanded rather than contracted, by February 26th, the local state authorities (chief of police Douglas Hosse) warned there would be arrests and indeed the next day police first withdrew their protection of the protestors (encouraging white mobs to attack them) and then arrested only the protestors in the one-sided altercations that ensued. But of course spectacular, one-sided violence merely confirmed the moral rightness of the protestors, merely demonstrated the injustice of the system and thereby rallied new recruits to their cause.

So as the police arrested one batch of protestors, another group took their place. And another. And another. The police arrested some eighty students that day and then stopped because they hadn’t the capacity to arrest any more. Over the following days, arrests mounted (more than 150 before the end) but of course that just drew more attention, which drew more recruits and the police found themselves in the same trap as counter-insurgents: applying force was creating protestors faster than removing them and Nashville had real, sharp limits on how many protestors they could arrest. Which mattered because it meant the disruption did not stop, which meant that pressure – on local politicians and the business community whose businesses were disrupted – did not stop.

In the event, the Nashville sit-ins had a dramatic climax: the home of Z. Alexander Looby was bombed (dynamite thrown through a window) presumably in retaliation for his support. No one was killed, but this act of terroristic violence against the protest serves as a paradigmatic example of the above dilemma: intended to frighten them, it galvanized support for the protest, creating political conditions in which city leaders (notably Mayor Ben West, confronted by Diane Nash and C.T. Vivian) had to back down. That in turn led to the business owners – directly pressured by the campaign and now abundantly aware that state repression was not going to make the disruption stop – to negotiate with protest leaders, leading (albeit not instantly) to Nashville desegregating its lunch counters.

What I want to note here is that these actions were not disconnected or unthinking but carefully planned and selected. In particular the target of the action is intended to itself demonstrate the injustice (which thereby aids in gaining support) and to provoke overreaction. In this way a non-violent movement does not just receive violence, but it disrupts and provokes, it makes people uncomfortable as a way of drawing attention and baiting overreaction. Perhaps the most famous example of this principle anywhere in the world was Mahatma Gandhi’s strategy of non-cooperation, in which protestors simply refused to buy British goods, work in British industries or in jobs in the British governing institutions. Gandhi also protested the British salt monopoly in India by illegally making his own salt (very much in public, as part of a large demonstration), to which the British responded with more repression. The disruption forced a response (British authorities arrested tens of thousands of Indians): after all if the British authorities did nothing in response to these kinds of actions, British revenues in India would collapse and they would be unable to govern the country anyway. But of course violent British crackdowns further delegitimized British colonial rule.

Moreover, it must be noted that these protect actions, while non-violent were disruptive. They were designed to disrupt something, because if they didn’t disrupt anything, they could be ignored. It is important here to separate two kinds of ‘protest the right way’ arguments here: practitioners of non-violence pointing out that violent actors claiming to act for the movement harm it and people outside the movement demanding that the movement not be disruptive at all. In the very case it is very obviously true that for a movement pursuing a non-violent strategy like this, violent actors are actively detrimental because – again – this is all an exercise in messaging and they harm the message. Crucially, while violent actors may feel like they are accomplishing more by fighting the authorities violently, remember that the entire reason movements adopt these strategies is they they cannot expect to win by fighting the authorities directly, consequently violent actions accomplish nothing (you will not win a street battle with the cops)⁶ but they do harm the message. But at the same time some disruption is necessary to attract attention and a response by the state.

Martin Luther King Jr. is, in fact, incredibly clear-sighted about this in his famous 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. While he openly notes that he initially tried negotiation and that his direct action is also primarily a means to return to negotiation, he declares openly that members of the movement must be “nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in a society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism” and that “the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” He also notes that he timed his action specifically to produce the desired pressure on businesses by timing it for the holiday shopping season (disrupting business), delayed only slightly in order to avoid negatively impacting the results of a local election. Disruption was the point, because disruption draws the necessary attention to the message and invites the state to act in repression which draws more attention, empowering the message and thus delivering the ‘attack on will’ at maximum volume and moral clarity.

Like any strategic approach, this approach works best in specific conditions. In particular it works most effectively in challenging a regime, law or practice maintained by violence, because that very violence plays into the kind of ‘throwing technique’ whereby the non-violent activist uses the state’s own violence against it. Such movements can thus, by disobeying the unjust law, take the violence that necessarily maintains it – violence that is normally concealed behind acquiescence to the law – and abruptly surface it. Notably in the above examples, protestors are not doing something unrelated to their cause to draw attention but rather in refusing to support the day-to-day function of colonial rule or by sitting at a specific lunch counter these actions surface the specific violence maintaining that specific law. It follows that laws, practices or regimes whose connection to violence is more indirect are much harder to challenge with these strategies.⁷ Because – and this is important to continue stressing – these methods are about messaging because the ‘target’ is will, so the clarity of the message matters quite a lot.

On the other hand, non-violent approaches can succeed where violent approaches might not have succeeded. It is debatable if Britain in the early 1900s could have handled an effort at armed insurrection in the British Raj – they had successfully quelled a major uprising in 1857 (and smaller efforts in 1909 and 1915 had also failed), of course, but the failure of other imperial powers to resist independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s might suggest they would not have repeated this success. But evidently considerable British preparation to put down an armed uprising didn’t much matter because the Quit India Movement and its predecessors didn’t give them an armed uprising, it increasingly gave them a non-violent movement they were utterly unprepared to effectively counter.

Likewise, it is important to remember that the system of Jim Crow segregation in the American South was sustained by terroristic violence against African-American communities and, backed up by local and state police, extremely well-prepared to meet violence with greater quantities of violence. Horrific events like the Wilmington Massacre (1898) and the Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) were vivid demonstrations of the ability of the white supremacist Jim Crow regime to muster superior quantities of violence (and a greater willingness to murder innocent people) if the question came to a violent confrontation. But one of the things that comes out extremely clearly in reading something like T.E. Ricks’ Waging a Good War is that white supremacist leaders – perhaps none more clearly than Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor – were wholly unprepared to fight a non-violent movement and instead by reacting with spectacular and horrifying brutality repeatedly played into the movement’s hands. By contrast it is striking, reading Ricks’ book, that the Civil Rights Movements tactics’ were most notably stymied in Albany, GA, where the local police chief, Laurie Pritchett realized that he could defeat their approach by having his officers act gently when arresting activists, by having enough jail space prepared for larger numbers and by charging them with things like disturbing the peace rather than with segregation laws, to avoid drawing attention to the injustice of the system.

Via Wikipedia, Bill Hudson’s famous photograph of police attacking Civil Rights marchers in Birmingham with dogs in 1963. Images like this served to demonstrate to much of the country the inherent violence and injustice of segregation.

(It is, of course, not an accident that COIN – counter-insurgency – strategy often follows similar injunctions towards avoiding provocation and what we might frame as gentleness. Fortunately for the protestor against injustice, the sort of people who tend to come to run systems of discrimination predicated on violence tend to be emotionally and constitutionally incapable of following that sort of advice – instead resorting by habit (often expressed in very gendered terms) to violence. The armies of Jim Crow had many a Bull Connor and very few Laurie Pritchetts, not by accident but as a direct result of the kind of system Jim Crow was. Also let me be clear: being tactically smart does not make Laurie Pritchett good; he was still defending a system of segregation, which was bad. Sometimes the bad guys have capable leaders, but they are still bad guys.)

All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power. The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran.⁸ Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go.

The reason regimes such as this aren’t more common is that they tend to function quite poorly: force is expensive and having to maintain large amounts of inward directed force continuously because the regime lacks a strong basis of legitimacy inhibits the effective function of everything else. Indeed, I would argue such ‘prison regimes’ mostly exist today because the negative returns to warfare mean that, unlike in previous eras, it simply isn’t worth the otherwise extremely doable task of better-functioning countries to conquer them. Consequently many authoritarian regimes attempt to ‘split the difference’ by ‘de-politicizing’ much of their population and repressing the small remainder. However building the apparatus and cultural assumptions to support that kind of regime takes a long time and a lot of resources – it generally has to be done well in advance, often as a decades-long project of regime security and coup-proofing. If it was easy to do, there wouldn’t be a half-dozen successful ‘color revolutions‘ in the last thirty or so years.

Conclusions

I haven’t stressed this yet, so let me do so now: obviously the ability of both terroristic insurgencies and non-violent protest movements to succeed is substantially based on the available media technology. It is not an accident that these techniques become increasingly prevalent in the 1900s with the emergence of mass-literary and mass media. Because these approaches are fundamentally about messaging, message technology matters a lot. Of course that technology has only become more rapid and more powerful since the mid-1900s, which further enhances the effectiveness of movements that can harness such technology.

To pull this all together, both violent insurgencies and non-violent protests have the same overall ‘theory of action’ – unable to defeat the armed forces of the state, they aim to instead defeat the state by striking at its popular base of support (at ‘will’ in the Clausewitzian sense). Consequently, because the ‘real battlefield’ is not the battlefield at all, but the minds of the various publics supporting the state, these campaigns – armed or unarmed – are essentially messaging campaigns, engaged in persuasion to convince the relevant public that it is more just or at least easier and less painful to give up the struggle and give the group some or all of its demands.

While such movements often fail, the fact that they can succeed at all is remarkable because these are efforts predicated on the fact of being so immensely weaker than the state they challenge that they have no realistic hope of ever meeting it force-for-force directly.

At the same time it is important to note that while the overall framework of these two approaches is the same their tactics are totally different and indeed fundamentally incompatible in most cases. Someone doing violence in the context of a non-violent movement is actively harming their cause because they are reducing the clear contrast and uncomplicated message the movement is trying to send. Likewise, it is relatively easy to dismiss non-violent supporters of violent movements so long as their core movement remains violent, simply by pointing to the violence of the core movement. It is thus very important for individuals to understand what kind of movement they are in and not ‘cosplay’ the other kind.

That difference ripples into smaller decisions. Insurgent movements generally seek to hide their membership from the state, because they wish to avoid the armed force of the state – they want the state to try to strike them, miss and hit civilians in order to create spectacular moments they can exploit. By contrast, non-violent movements do not seek to hide their membership from the state, because they seek to use state repression as a means to grow too large to arrest. Gandhi is quoted by (ed. Merton, op. cit.) as noting, “I do not appreciate any underground activity. Millions cannot go underground. Millions need not.” Civil Rights protestors repeatedly went to jail, touting their willingness to bear their arrest under their own names, openly, as a badge of honor. Non-violent movements instead invite documentation both of their numbers (they want to seem big) and of the state’s actions against them. Because whereas the insurgent hopes state violence will fall on non-movement-members, a non-violent protest is intentionally inviting state violence to fall on them because doing so dramatizes and exemplifies the injustice of that violence.

A View From America

With all of that laid out, let me draw some conclusions for the current tense political situation in the United States.

First, I think it is fairly clear that the ‘anti-ICE’ or ‘Abolish ICE’ movement – the name being a catchy simplification for a wide range of protests against immigration enforcement – is primarily a non-violent protest movement. Despite some hyperventilating about ‘insurgency tactics,’ anti-ICE protestors are pretty clearly engaged in civil disobedience (when they aren’t engaged in lawful protest), not insurgency. To be blunt: you know because no one has yet car-bombed an ICE or CBP squad or opened fire from an elevated window on an DHS patrol.⁹ As I hope we’ve already demonstrated, mere organization is not an indicator of an insurgent movement: non-violent movements have to be organized (even if just locally so), often more organized and better trained than violent ones. Effective non-violence, after all, comes less naturally to humans, for whom violence has been normal for at least tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.

But the tactics of anti-ICE protestors, most visible in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, follow the outline for non-violent protest here quite well. While protestors do attempt to impose a significant degree of friction on DHS immigration enforcement by (legally!) following and documenting DHS actions, that has also served as the predicate for the classic formula for non-violent action: it baits the agents of the state (ICE and CBP) into open acts of violence on camera which in turn reveal the violent nature of immigration enforcement. In this, DHS leaders like Gregory Bovino have essentially played the role of Bull Connor, repeatedly playing into the hands of protestors by urging – or at least failing to restrain – the spectacular, cinematic violence of their agents. Just as the armies of Jim Crow had many Bull Connors and few Laurie Pritchetts, it turns out that Border Patrol and ICE appear to have many Bull Connors; it remains to be seen if they have even one Laurie Pritchett.

Via Wikipedia a photo (2026) of postors in Minneapolis, protesting the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both shot by ICE and CBP agents while protesting the administration’s immigration policy. As with the earlier Civil Rights Movement, spectacular public acts of violence by the state serve to delegitmize it, broadcasting the protestors’ point about the state’s unjust use of violence.

The result has been a remarkable collapse in public approval for immigration enforcement, mirrored by some pretty clear implications for elections later this year of the trend continues. Indeed, while doubtless many in the movement are impatient at what they perceive as the slow pace of movement given that they are trying to stop deportations happening right now, as non-violent movements go, the public perception shift has been remarkably fast. ‘Abolish ICE’ went from being a fringe position to a plurality position – close to a majority position – in roughly a year. Civil Rights and Quit India took decades. In part I suspect this has to do with both the prevalence of mass media technologies in the United States – a society in which nearly everyone has a pocket internet device that can immediately send or receive text, audio or most importantly video – and the increasing capability of those platforms. Where the public may have experienced the Birmingham protests through a TV screen at a delay on the nightly news, today high-detail color footage of DHS uses of force are beamed directly into people’s phones within hours or minutes of the event taking place.

Via Wikipedia, a photograph of anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis.

By contrast, the administration is fundamentally caught on the horns of a dilemma. Their most enthusiastic supporters very much want to see high spectacle immigration enforcement, both as an end unto itself and also as a sign of the administration’s continued commitment to it. In this, they act much like the white supremacist publics that sat behind men like Bull Connor demanding repression. But while the administration clearly remains unwilling to actually change its immigration policies, it desperately needs them out of the news to avoid catastrophic midterm wipeout. But ‘go quiet’ on immigration and lose core supporters; go ‘loud’ on immigration and produce more viral videos that enrage the a larger slice of the country. A clever tactician might be able to thread that needle, but at this point it seems difficult to accuse Kristi Noem of being a clever tactician.

Finally, we might briefly touch on the question of ‘coup proofing’ and if the administration is capable of insulating itself from public backlash. And the answer appears to fairly clearly be some version of ‘no.’ The United States electoral system is a tough nut to crack: almost anything strong enough to alter the results would be so obvious that you might as well just try and stage a coup. Meanwhile, as noted above, establishing the kind of regime that can rule by violence and the fear of violence in the United States is hardly unprecedented – that’s what the Jim Crow South was – but it is not a system which can be willed into existence overnight. Establishing the Jim Crow regime in the American South required more than a decade of terror and repression. Similar regimes overseas likewise took many years to construct and require a very large ‘in group’ willing to use violence – often on the order of a quarter to a half of a percent of the population. Indications that DHS is already struggling to recruit despite very obviously being far short of the number of agents required to effectively maintain an authoritarian state speak to the difficulty of creating such a large ‘insider’ force.¹⁰

In short then, it seems like the current administration’s immigration policy is facing a non-violent movement and is both vulnerable to that movement and actively playing into its hands, repeating the tactical and strategic mistakes the defenders of Jim Crow made in the 1950s and 1960s. From this framework, the non-violent anti-ICE movement appears to both be succeeding right now and stand a good chance of succeeding eventually, assuming it retains a strategic focus. If the administration could restrain its open embrace of anti-immigrant violence, it might be able to slow that process down, but it is unclear that the administration is actually capable of doing so, since anti-immigrant violence was essentially one of its core campaign promises.

But this dilemma is, of course, the core of why anti-ICE protest tactics work: because the system itself is unjust and its basic function (armed federal agents abducting people from the interior of the United States) unpopular, protestors following a non-violent framework – often all they are doing is just filming what ICE and CBP does – can present the administration with an impossible choice: defang the protests by no longer enforcing the policy by violence (essentially conceding their demands) or continue to engage in open violence against non-violent protestors and lose the battle for the minds of the public. So long as the policy remains to enact immigration enforcement through exemplary violence in places in the United States where that is staggeringly unpopular, the policy remains vulnerable to having its inherent violence exposed by non-violence.

(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. I plan on publishing one chapter a month on the newsletter, and aim to have the full report done by the end of the year.)

For decades, American construction has fallen behind almost every other major sector in productivity growth. As far back as 1970 researchers noted that construction productivity improvement significantly lagged productivity improvement in the economy overall, and by 1985 economists were investigating what appeared to be declining construction productivity. Stanford civil engineering professor Paul Teicholz noted in a 2004 article in AECbytes that between 1964 and 2004, construction productivity declined by 0.59% per year on average, which was “particularly alarming when compared to the increasing labor productivity in all non-farm industries, which have experienced an increasing productivity of 1.77%/year over the same time period.” A 2017 article in The Economist noted that “construction holds the dubious honour of having the lowest productivity gains of any industry.” In a 2023 New York Times column, Ezra Klein wrote that “A construction worker in 2020 produced less than a construction worker in 1970, at least according to the official statistics.”

The trend of construction productivity in the United States failing to improve over time is indeed concerning. “Productivity” means some measure of output, divided by some measure of input. When productivity is improving, we get more output for a given amount of input over time; if productivity is falling, we get less output for a given amount of input over time. If productivity doesn’t improve, we can’t expect construction costs to fall and things like houses, roads, and bridges to get any cheaper. Because of this, it’s worth looking deeply at what exactly the trends in US construction productivity are.

Economists and researchers measure construction productivity in a variety of different ways. We can broadly categorize these metrics by their level of granularity:

At the lowest level of granularity, we have metrics that track productivity changes across the entire construction sector.
Slightly more granular are metrics that look at productivity changes in a particular subsector, such as housing construction.
Looking more specifically, we have metrics that look at productivity changes for constructing particular buildings.
And finally we have metrics that track productivity changes for individual construction tasks.

Each category of metric gives a slightly different perspective on productivity trends, and each has its own measurement challenges that we must consider when interpreting the data.

Sector-wide productivity metrics

Sector-wide productivity metrics look at productivity trends across the entire construction industry. They answer if, overall, we’re getting more or less construction output for a given amount of input. The graph below, for instance, shows trends in US construction productivity by using total construction spending as a measure of output, and total hours worked in the construction sector as a measure of input. (Spending has been adjusted to 2025 dollars using the Consumer Price Index —we’ll talk more about whether this is a reasonable way to adjust for inflation later.)

We can see that, per this metric, construction labor productivity — the amount of construction output we get for a given amount of labor — is virtually flat between 1964 and 2024, whereas labor productivity in the economy overall rose by a factor of three.

Sector-wide metrics which look at productivity trends across the entire construction industry are very common. Paul Teicholz uses the same data we used above to look at trends in construction productivity in a 2013 article, and his 2004 article uses a very similar metric (rather than total spending, he uses US Department of Commerce construction spending data, a subset, as a measure of output).

In their 2025 paper “The Strange and Awful Path of Construction Productivity in the US”, economists Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson use a slightly different sector-wide productivity metric. For output they use real (inflation-adjusted) construction value-add data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and for input they use the number of full-time construction employees. (Unlike total construction spending, which just tracks the value of the outputs, value-add measures the value of construction outputs minus the value of the inputs used.) Goolsbee and Syverson also look at trends in construction total factor productivity (TFP), which measures productivity of both labor and capital (equipment, machinery, etc.) by comparing the growth rates of real construction value-add to the growth rates of construction labor and capital inputs. According to Goolsbee and Syverson’s productivity metrics, construction productivity looks even worse. Productivity increased from the 1950s until the mid-1960s, but since then it has declined by roughly 50%.

Discussions of US construction productivity often reference this Goolsbee and Syverson paper, or the data behind it. An early version of Goolsbee and Syverson’s paper is what Ezra Klein is referring to in his 2023 New York Times column, and it’s referred to in a 2025 Federal Reserve Economic Brief examining productivity. The data is also used in a 2026 report from Goldman Sachs looking at the causes of low US construction productivity. Management consultancy McKinsey likewise uses BEA value-add data in a 2017 report to construct a similar productivity metric, gross value add per hour worked, to show that in the US construction productivity improvement had lagged virtually every other industry:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also uses BEA data, combined with its own estimates of hours worked, to calculate trends in both labor productivity and total factor productivity for a variety of sectors, including construction. This metric likewise shows construction productivity as stagnant or declining. It’s not uncommon for discussions of productivity to also reference this BLS metric; for instance, it’s used by Federal Reserve economists Daniel Garcia and Raven Molloy in their 2025 paper “Reexamining Lackluster Productivity Growth in Construction”.

Sector-wide measures of US construction productivity thus tell a consistent story of stagnant productivity growth, differing only in how bad the problem appears. By some measures, productivity is merely flat over the last several decades; by others, productivity has declined significantly.

Sub-sector productivity metrics

Subsector metrics are also commonly used to get a picture of national construction productivity trends, particularly metrics that look at trends in housing construction. In their 2023 NBER working paper, “Why Has Construction Productivity Stagnated?” Princeton economist Leonardo D’Amico and coauthors looked at productivity trends in US homebuilding by dividing the total number of housing units produced in the US by the total number of residential construction employees. They found that housing productivity had declined significantly since the 1960s — though, as we’ll see, there are issues with their choice of metric. Goolsbee and Syverson also looked at housing units per employee in their 2025 paper, along with another housing productivity metric, square footage of housing per employee. As with D’Amico et al., housing units per employee shows declining productivity over time, while square feet per employee shows slightly more complex trends: productivity appears to decline between the 1970s and the early 1990s, and decline since then for multifamily construction, but single-family construction shows an increase in productivity of close to 50% between 1990 and 2020. In their 2025 paper, Garcia and Molloy also look at productivity trends in single-family home construction using square footage of housing produced per employee, though they also try to include quality adjustments in this metric. (We’ll discuss quality adjustments more later.)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also produces estimates for construction productivity trends for four sub-sectors: single-family home construction, multifamily home construction (i.e., apartment buildings), industrial building construction, and highway and bridge construction. These are based on individual subsector estimates of construction spending from the US Census, and BLS estimates of hours worked. Per the BLS, while single-family home productivity has been stagnant since 1987 and highway and bridge productivity has declined, productivity is up for both multifamily construction and for industrial building construction.

Construction subsector productivity estimates thus generally show stagnant or declining construction productivity, though with significant variation. Some subsectors show increasing productivity, and some show different trends by different metrics. Single-family home construction shows increasing productivity when measured by square feet of home per employee, but unchanging productivity when measured by subsector spending per labor hour; for multifamily home construction, the reverse is true.

Project and building productivity metrics

Below the level of construction subsectors, we have productivity metrics that look at trends for individual building types, such as the amount of labor required to build a single-family home. These sorts of metrics are much less common, as it’s rare to get detailed project-level productivity data from builders, but are still seen occasionally. In 1964 and 1972 the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducted studies on the number of hours it took to build a single-family home, finding that the average annual percent change in labor hours per square foot was just -0.6% per year (ie: productivity increased, but slowly). The Construction Industry Institute has a “Benchmarking and Metrics Productivity Database” that tracks project-level productivity metrics for submitted projects. A NIST analysis of this database from 2000 to 2007 noted a decline in project-level productivity, measured in output in dollars per labor-hour.

We can construct our own building-level productivity metric by using data from construction estimating guides. Estimating guides, produced by companies like RS Means and Craftsman, provide information on cost, labor, and material requirements for hundreds of different construction tasks, and are used to generate cost estimates for new construction projects. Some companies have also often been producing their estimating guides for many years, making them a valuable tool for analyzing productivity trends; both RS Means and Craftsman have been producing estimating guides since the 1950s.

Starting in 1993, Craftsman’s National Construction Estimator included an estimate of the total number of hours required to build a “typical” single-family home. If we compare the estimated number of hours per square foot in 1993 and 2026, they’re almost identical. The only task that has changed is insulation installation, which took a single man six days in 1993 and now takes one man 3 days. It’s also worth noting that this hours per square foot figure is also virtually the same as the number of hours per square foot calculated by the BLS in their 1964 and 1972 studies.

Thus, project-level measurements of US construction productivity also tend to show a stagnation or a decline in US construction productivity over time.

Task-level productivity metrics

Finally, below project-level productivity metrics, we have measures that look at productivity of individual construction tasks: laying bricks, framing walls, installing plumbing, and so on. These metrics are fairly commonly used, thanks to the existence of estimating guides. We can look at changes in task-level construction productivity by seeing how the time and labor required for various specific construction tasks has changed in estimating guides over time.

Allmon et al (2000) looked at productivity changes for 20 different construction tasks from 1974 through 1996 using RS Means estimating guide data, and found that labor productivity increased for seven tasks, decreased for two tasks, and was unchanged for 11 tasks. Goodrum et al (2002) looked at productivity changes between 1976 and 1998 for 200 different construction tasks using data from several different estimating guides. They found that labor productivity declined for 30 tasks, was unchanged for 64 tasks, and improved for 107 tasks, with an average growth rate in labor productivity ranging from 0.8% to 1.8% depending on the estimating guide. A follow up study by Goodrum in 2009 that looked at productivity trends in 100 different construction tasks between 1977 and 2004 found a somewhat lower average productivity increase of just 0.47% per year, with significant variation between task categories.

We can also use different versions of estimating guides to do our own analysis of productivity trends. The chart below shows the relative installation rates for 40 different construction tasks which are listed in the RS Means estimating guides from 1985 and 2023. 10 tasks got more productive over the period, 10 got less productive, and 20 tasks were unchanged.

We can also try to calculate installation rates directly, using the values RS Means lists for task labor cost and hourly wages. The chart below shows the installation rates calculated for 17 construction tasks performed by either carpenters or sheet metal workers that were listed in the 1954, 1985, and 2023 version of the RS Means estimating guide.1 Effective installation rates for each task were calculated by dividing unit labor costs for the task by the average worker wage for that task type. By this analysis, 12 of 17 tasks improved in productivity between 1954 and 1985, and 15 of 17 tasks between 1985 and 2023 got more productive.

One challenge with task-level productivity metrics is that we should expect a major mechanism of productivity improvement to be replacing old tasks for new ones. Steel manufacturing became massively more productive with the introduction of the Bessemer process, which took much less time and effort than the previous cementation process, but a task-level analysis — seeing how productivity in the cementation process improved over time — wouldn’t capture this.

One way around this is to look at the categories of tasks necessary for completing a building, rather than specific tasks. We can do this using Craftsman’s National Construction Estimator, which includes a breakdown of what’s necessary to complete a single-family home — excavation, installing doors and windows, running wiring, etc. — and what fraction of the total cost to build a home they make up. By looking at changes in these fractions of total home cost over time, we can see which sorts of tasks have gotten more productive and which have gotten less productive.

The chart below shows the relative fraction of different categories of tasks needed to build a single-family home for 1986 and 2026. Overall, there’s surprisingly little change: most task categories have the same ratio of overall costs in 1986 as they were in 2026, suggesting few types of tasks overall had much change in productivity.

Overall task-level productivity analysis shows significant variation in productivity trends. Looking at published installation rates for several dozen construction tasks between 1985 and 2023 implies that, as with other measures, construction productivity has shown little to no increase. Looking at high-level tasks needed to complete a single-family home also shows few tasks that have improved in productivity. But other analyses yield different results. Calculating implied installation rates using labor costs suggests significant task-level productivity improvement over time. Likewise, various studies of installation rates show construction tasks improving in productivity on average from the 1970s through the 1990s (with rate of improvement perhaps falling off over time).

International productivity measures

The above metrics of construction productivity all look at trends in US construction. However, it’s also worth understanding construction productivity trends in other countries. If other countries show substantial construction productivity improvements, that suggests that the US’s productivity challenges are something specific to the US. But if other countries show stagnant or declining construction productivity, that suggests the challenges may be due to broader trends, or to the nature of the process of construction itself.

We can look at international trends in construction productivity at the sector level by using KLEMS databases, which aggregate industry-level productivity data for countries around the world.2 EU KLEMS has productivity data for European countries, as well as the US, UK, Japan, and (for older releases) Korea, Canada, and Australia. Asia KLEMS has productivity data for Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and India. LA KLEMS has productivity data for several Latin American countries, and World KLEMS has links to Russian, Chinese, and Canadian KLEMS data.3

The charts below show changes in construction labor productivity, measured as gross value add per labor hour, for 45 different countries. Productivity has been normalized to equal 100 for the first year in which there’s data.

Per KLEMS data, US construction productivity steadily declined from 1970 to around 1995, after which it leveled off. This is broadly consistent with other measures of US construction-sector productivity, which show either stagnant or declining productivity since roughly the 1960s.

Other countries show a somewhat different historical pattern. For the 20 countries where data goes back to the 1970s (which includes most of Western Europe, the Anglosphere, Japan, and Korea), only one other country, Greece, shows declining construction productivity from 1970 to 1995, and its rate of decline is much lower than the US. Every other country saw rising construction productivity during that period.

Since 1995, however, construction productivity in these 20 countries (minus Canada and Korea, whose time series stopped around 2010) improved much less. Per KLEMS, the US has an average annual rate of improvement of 0.2% per year from 1995 to 2021, which is slightly better than average for this group of 18 countries. Only Belgium and Ireland have maintained a steady, high rate of construction productivity improvement greater than 1% per year.

Starting in the 1980s, there is also KLEMS data for China, Taiwan, and India, and starting in the 1990s there’s data for Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Russia. Taiwan shows improving productivity until around 2000, after which it flattens out/declines. Korea and Russia show similar patterns of improvement followed by stagnation. India’s productivity improvement has remained flat, as has Poland’s, Czechia’s, Malta’s, Cyprus’ and Slovenia’s. Other Eastern European countries have improved in construction productivity since the 1990s, as have Latin American countries (with the exception of Honduras, which has declined significantly over time).

China’s productivity improved from the late 1980s through the 2010s, though its rate of improvement does not appear to be particularly impressive. (It’s roughly similar to the historical rates of improvement seen in Korea, France, Sweden, or Portugal.)

Goldman Sachs also looked at international construction productivity for several large, wealthy countries in a 2026 report. While they also found poor records of construction productivity for most countries since 1990, per their analysis the US had the worst record of construction productivity improvement of any country analyzed. This appears to stem in part from using BEA data for US productivity calculations, which yield a greater productivity decline than other US productivity metrics.

Overall, international construction-sector productivity data suggests that the US is not alone in suffering from stagnant or declining construction sector productivity. Rates of productivity improvement in the US over the last several decades appear broadly similar to improvement rates observed in other large, wealthy countries. Many countries that at one point had substantially improving construction productivity (Western Europe, Korea, Taiwan) have seen it flatten out in recent years. Others (India, Japan) have never seen substantial improvements. The countries that do show sustained, large improvements tend to be either small (Ireland, Denmark, Estonia), poor (Colombia, Peru), or both. Rates of construction productivity improvement are nearly always much lower than improvements seen in manufacturing, or in the economy overall.

Challenges with measuring construction productivity

Accurately measuring trends in construction productivity means accurately measuring both inputs and outputs over time. There are a number of difficulties in doing this.

For outputs, one major challenge is that outputs might change over time in ways that are difficult to account for. Sector-wide measures of construction productivity, for instance, typically measure construction output in terms of total construction spending, tallying up everything that was spent on construction during the year — housing in Texas, skyscrapers in New York, schools in Washington, and so on. However, if the composition of things that are built in the country changes — if over time there are more homes built in Texas and fewer skyscrapers built in New York — this could distort productivity measures.

For example, assume there are two types of houses, Type A which requires 1000 hours of labor to produce, and Type B which requires 1500 hours of labor to produce. Last year 100 of each type of house were built, yielding 200 total houses built with 250,000 hours of labor. The next year, however, 50 Type A houses and 150 Type B houses were built, yielding 200 total houses built with 275,000 hours of labor. If you simply look at the outputs (200 houses each year) without accounting for the differing difficulty of building them, this looks like a roughly 9% decline in productivity, since it took more hours to build the same number of houses. But what’s actually happened is a shift to building fewer easy to build houses and more hard to build houses. You could in fact get a measured productivity decline even if productivity was improving for each type of house. This is a variation of Simpson’s Paradox, the observation that for groups with differences between them, trends in individual sub-groups can be reversed when looking at the groups collectively.

These effects of a changing output mix aren’t merely theoretical. When Allen (1985) looked at US construction productivity trends from 1968 to 1978, he found that this sort of change in the output mix — specifically, a shift from capital-intensive civil construction to labor intensive home construction — was responsible for the lion’s share of the measured productivity decline.

This sort of shift in the output can also be at work in sub-sector measures of construction productivity. Measures of housing sector productivity, for instance, can be distorted by failing to account for changes in what sort of housing gets built. D’Amico et al. (2023) used “housing units per employee” as a measure of construction productivity, but this measure fails to take into account the fact that on average houses increased in size over time. An average home in 2025 is much larger, and requires more effort to build, than an average home in 1985.

This particular distortion is relatively easily corrected by multiplying the number of homes produced by average home size, to get “square feet of home produced per employee”. As we’ve noted, several studies of construction productivity use this metric. But increasing size isn’t the only way that homes change over time. For one, modern homes are built to stricter building code standards than older homes; they will have greater fire resistance, greater ability to withstand high winds and earthquakes, and greater energy efficiency. For another, modern homes have more amenities and services in them: they’re more likely to have air conditioners, dishwashers, insulation, generally will have more bathrooms, and so on. Thus, a square foot of home built today should be considered as more output than a square foot of home built in 1960.

Housing amenities over time, via humanprogress.org.

It can also be challenging to accurately measure inputs to the construction process. Labor is the construction input most often tracked, but this can be subject to its own “input mix” problems — namely, ensuring whether labor hours are all actually being devoted to the outputs being considered. As with changes in the output mix, if there’s a shift in how construction workers are spending their time, this could show up as a change in construction productivity that’s not actually occurring.

For instance, we’ve noted that both D’Amico et al (2023) and Goolsbee and Syverson (2025) include productivity metrics which track the amount of housing produced per residential construction employee. However, workers in residential construction don’t merely build new houses, they also renovate old houses. And there has been a gradual trend upward in spending on residential renovations. Renovations now represent 40-45% of spending on residential construction, up from 20-25% in 1970. Thus some of the measured change in “housing per employee” is likely an artifact of employees increasingly working on renovations. (Goolsbee and Syverson’s housing-per-employee metric likely doesn’t have this problem for post-1990 data, as after that BLS employment data breaks down residential remodeling employment separately).

More generally, if labor isn’t properly accounted for, that will obviously distort any productivity measures. It’s notable that for some of the sub-sector productivity measures produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor hours worked appears to be much more uniform than changes in output. For industrial buildings, there are several spikes in output (2009, 2015, and 2024) during which labor input stays flat, resulting in productivity spikes. It’s possible these are real (though it seems unlikely that firms suddenly got 50% more productive, then 50% less productive, over just a few years), but it’s also possible these are fictional, at least partially the result of labor inputs not being properly accounted for. Notably, single-family home construction does show labor inputs rising and falling in concert with output, and shows productivity as much flatter over time.

Another problem regarding labor is that many measures of construction specifically measure labor productivity — output per labor hour, or per employee — rather than total factor productivity (output per total amount of inputs). This is a problem because it’s often possible to automate or mechanize construction work — replace labor with capital — in ways that aren’t efficiency-enhancing. Construction automation and mechanization often requires a large amount of equipment to duplicate what’s possible with a relatively small amount of labor. (When I worked at the modular construction startup Katerra, the executives would often complain how hard it was for Katerra, with its expensive factories, to compete with “Bubba and his truck”: low-overhead contractors who used little more than power tools and manual labor.) Thus labor productivity could improve even as overall productivity declined.

A problem related to changes in the output mix is that construction output is often measured in dollars spent. Spending in dollars must be adjusted to account for the fact that the value of a dollar changes over time. This is typically done using what’s known as a deflator, some measure of price changes over time that can be used to convert spending in dollars to a consistent measure of construction output. The Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures price inflation for a basket of consumer goods over time, is an example of a deflator.

There are several challenges with using deflators. One is simply choosing one that accurately captures price changes relevant to construction. Construction uses certain sorts of inputs whose price changes may not be adequately captured by commonly-used deflators. A spike in the price of building materials (such as was observed during the Covid-19 pandemic) might dramatically raise the costs of construction much more than the CPI rises.

For example, consider a building that requires $100,000 worth of materials, and gets sold for a threefold markup at $300,000. Now an identical building is being planned, but building material prices double, raising the input price to $200,000 and the output price is now $600,000. However, the Consumer Price Index only increases by 10%. Deflating output by the cost of building materials would show identical output for the first and second buildings — the price of the final building doubled, but so did the cost of the input materials. But deflating by the consumer price index, which only rose 10% between the first and second buildings, would now make it appear that the second building was worth much more output than the identical first building.

In practice, this sort of disconnect between construction input prices and other measures of inflation appears rare — in Teicholz’s 2013 article, there was little difference in productivity trends using construction-specific deflators and the more general Consumer Price Index. A more difficult problem with deflators is that a deflator can mask any gains (or losses) in productivity. Ideally we would have a deflator that measured changes in the prices of a finished building — a so-called “output deflator”, which measures the price changes of final goods and services. The Consumer Price Index is an example of an output deflator. However, many construction deflators are “input deflators”, which track changes in the price of various construction inputs — materials, labor, and so on. Using an input deflator can mask changes in productivity, because actual output is not being properly accounted for.

For instance, assume we have a building that requires $100,000 worth of materials, and 1000 hours of labor to build. We sell this building for $300,000. Now suppose that building material prices stay flat, but we figure out a way to build an essentially identical building for $75,000 worth of materials and 750 hours worth of labor, which we sell for $225,000.

In this example, productivity has improved markedly — we’ve gotten an effectively identical building for 75% of the material and 75% of the labor required previously. However, if we used an input deflator, we’d get no measured change in productivity. Output is measured in dollars for both buildings — $300,000 for the first, $225,000 for the second — and the value of the deflator stays the same since input prices haven’t changed. So using an input deflator would make it look like we’re using 75% of the material and labor inputs to get 75% of the output. Conversely, if we got less productive — if it now took $125,000 worth of materials and 1250 hours of labor to build an effectively identical building which we sold for $375,000 — that would also look like productivity being flat, getting 25% more building by using 25% more materials and labor, rather than the decline that it is.

It’s thus important to have some deflator that can capture changes in the actual value of buildings, not merely the prices of their inputs. However, figuring out how much a given amount of construction should be valued is difficult: it’s susceptible both to the output mix problem (a sector-wide deflator needs to account for the fact that the mix of buildings may be changing), and the changing quality problem (your deflator needs to somehow capture the fact that a 1000 square foot house today is “more house” than a 1000 square foot house built in 1975 due to code improvements, more amenities, and so on).

Thus “what deflator to use?” is a perennial problem when analyzing trends in construction productivity. In his 2013 article on construction productivity, Teicholz went so far as to use seven different deflators to analyze construction productivity trends. Goolsbee and Syverson (2025) noted that much of their apparent measured decline of construction productivity was a product of the construction deflator used by the BEA, which showed a much higher rate of increase in construction prices than other deflators: since output is dollars spent divided by the deflator, this would register as a decline in construction output, and thus a decline in productivity, compared to deflators which showed a lower increase in price. Garcia and Molloy (2025) note that the Census Single Family Price Index, a commonly used deflator for single-family home construction, does not fully capture changes in home quality over time: the quality adjustments include things like increases in square footage and changes in HVAC systems, but not things like improved energy efficiency or interior finish quality. Garcia and Molloy estimate that improperly accounted for quality changes result in underestimating single-family construction productivity improvements by up to 0.8% per year.

More generally, the accounting required for accurate sector or sub-sector construction productivity estimates is very difficult. We can see this by looking at changes in KLEMS data over time. New KLEMS releases don’t merely extend the time series for existing data, but they revise and update past data. These revisions can substantially alter productivity trends. Between 2019 and 2024, revisions to the UK KLEMS data resulted in a swing from showing positive construction productivity growth between 1996 and 2016 to those same years showing negative productivity growth. Swedish data revisions showed the opposite, going from negative productivity growth using 2019 data to flat productivity growth using 2024 data.

Task-level metrics of construction productivity are immune to many construction productivity measurement problems. Because we typically have a direct measure of output (materials installed per hour, etc.), we don’t face the problem of converting an output measured in dollars, or of output mix problems that stem from combining different types of outputs into one measure. But task-level metrics have their own challenges. For one, we face the problem of how to go from task-level productivity estimates to estimates of whole building, subsector, or sector productivity. For instance, task-level productivity may be improving on average (as per Goodrum et al. 2002 and 2009), but perhaps the productivity-improving tasks are less commonly used, and the more commonly used ones are showing less growth. It seems notable that for Craftsman’s full-house estimates, only one category of task — insulation installation — improved in productivity from 1993 to 2025.

Another difficulty of task-level measures of productivity is that they’re almost universally based on estimating guide data, rather than data from actual buildings produced. But this is a relatively minor weakness, as there’s good reasons to think that estimating guide data is reasonably accurate: empirically, it’s valuable enough for construction businesses to continue to pay for it over many decades, and estimating guide data seems to largely track data from other sources. Potter and Syverson (2025) noted that RS Means estimates of city-level construction costs largely agreed with construction cost survey data, and Craftman’s task-based estimates for single-family home construction cost aligns with the average price per square foot of new home construction from the US Census.

Overall, it’s hard to be confident of any single metric of construction productivity, due to the numerous, difficult-to-resolve measurement issues at work. Examinations of construction productivity will thus often use multiple metrics. Goolsbee and Syverson (2025) consider several different productivity metrics, and Teicholz (2013) uses several different deflators to try to avoid distortions from any outlier deflators.

Conclusion

Tying this all together, what can we say about trends in US construction productivity?

We can look at trends in productivity — the amount of output we get for a given amount of input — at different levels, from the sector as a whole, to sub-sectors such as housing construction, to individual buildings, all the way down to individual construction tasks. Productivity metrics for the entire construction sector consistently show productivity either staying the same or declining over time, in contrast to other sectors like manufacturing and to the economy overall. We see these trends both in the US and in most large, wealthy countries.

Sub-sector productivity metrics also broadly show stagnant or declining productivity, though not universally. Project and building-level measures of productivity also generally show trends of stagnant or declining productivity, though most of this data is for home construction.

Task-level productivity trend estimates are, like sub-sector trends, somewhat mixed. Some task-level estimates show similar trends of stagnant or declining productivity over time, others show sluggish to modest growth depending on the collection of tasks and the time period considered.

All these estimates must be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s difficult to accurately measure construction inputs and outputs. Productivity estimates can be distorted by a variety of factors, including changes in the output mix, failing to properly account for construction labor inputs, and improperly deflating construction spending.

But these measurement difficulties are tempered by the fact that the estimates almost all point in the same direction. Most measures of construction productivity show at best very low levels of growth, far below what’s observed in the economy overall; many measures show declining productivity. We see some subsectors that may have seen periods of substantially increasing productivity (such as industrial building construction), and evidence that some individual construction tasks have gotten more productive for at least some periods of time, but overall the picture of stagnant productivity growth is fairly consistent.

RSMeans doesn’t give individual trade hourly rates for 1954, so for the 1954-1985 period we’ll simply use the average construction wage increase over that time.

KLEMS stands for capital (K), labor (L), energy (E), materials (M), and services (S).

To calculate productivity using this data — specifically, labor productivity, or the amount of output we get for a specific amount of labor — we can use the “chain linked gross value add” measure, VA_Q or VA_QI in the database. Gross value-add is the value of the outputs (in this case, the buildings and infrastructure produced) minus the value of “intermediate inputs” — materials, services, energy, and other things purchased from outside the sector in question. In other words, it’s the total value that the industry itself contributes. “Chain linked” is a way of adjusting for inflation, by calculating the growth rate for one year using the previous year’s prices, then “chaining” those growth rates together. To get sector productivity, we just divide chain linked gross value-add by a measure of total labor effort in that sector. For that labor effort variable, we’ll use H_EMP, which is the total number of hours worked by “engaged persons” — employees, business owners, and people who are self-employed. For a few countries, we’ll need to calculate labor productivity slightly differently. India’s KLEMS data doesn’t include H_EMP, so we’ll use the number of employees instead. China’s KLEMS data doesn’t include VA_Q, but it does include the growth rate of labor productivity by industry, which provides the same information.