More output for the same amount of input. When achieved, we call it an increase in productivity. Increases in productivity lead to higher standards of living. A firm can achieve higher productivity levels through technological changes as one method. Your book mentioned how this helped Wal-Mart and Amazon to rise to the top. Using the right combination of labor and capital a firm can also produce higher outputs especially when the labor is specialized. Other combinations will suffer from the law of diminishing returns realizing the marginal product of labor and the average product of labor falling. You have learned that cost of production depends a lot on productivity and efficiencies achieved. That economies of scale can bring down cost dramatically for some industries, providing society with goods and services that we have become accustomed to. We learned early on that population is a demand shifter, and when increasing, it is a shift to the right.
With these ideas in mind, is the cost of production, technological change, economy of scale, marginal product of labor important in our daily life?