Even in terms of widgets per hour, you need to be VERY careful to include measures of quality. 1 - Underlying defects will absolutely sink your downstream prod

Even in terms of widgets per hour, you need to be VERY careful to include measures of quality. 1 - Underlying defects will absolutely sink your downstream production rate. 2 - If you only measure widgets per hour, the machine will make more, but smaller widgets (See Soviet Nail factory story - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-soviet-nail-factory-produce-useless-nails-to-improve-metrics https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-sov... ) 3 - Quality has a quantity all it's own. Many times, better widgets will improve efficiency many times over their own cost of production. 4 - Your professor was real dumb.