Pay any attention to the big economic debate and you'll hear plenty of claims about how low our productivity growth is, how low the developed world's productivity growth is, how lifting productivity is the only way to improve our living standards and that maybe all the big increases in productivity are behind us with only rats-and-mice left – pizza delivery by drone, faster pirated movie downloads, that sort of thing.

There has been a serious argument for several years about Northwestern University Professor Robert Gordon's theory that we don't make productivity gains like we used to. The professor points to the major productivity leaps of the past quarter-millennium from things like the steam engine, railways, indoor plumbing and electric light. By comparison, the iPod and George Foreman Grill just don't cut it.

And that's why I want to focus on ironing – one of the great productivity sappers plaguing civilisation. Just as domestic running water was a great leap forward for the economy, so too would be the emancipation from the ironing board.

It is a wasteful absurdity that we have become slaves to some ancient fashionista who decreed the wrinkles nature intended for garments would not do, that heat, pressure and labour had to be unstintingly applied evermore. If we had corralled a tenth of the energy and effort expended on smoothing cloth, we'd have long-since colonised Mars, our pizza-delivery rocket drones would be plying the trade routes of Proxima Centauri.

Just as fashion led us down this unproductive path, fashion can free us. The precedent exists in men's hairstyles. Where once men fought to tame unruly forelocks with Brylcreem and "product", a revolution was started by unkempt punk bands. It took a while but by 2002 when a baby-faced Matt Giteau debuted for the Wallabies, the straight-out-of-a-busy-bed-running-for-the-door look was on the way.

It will again take time for common sense to prevail over entrenched fashion, for the anti-ironing movement to blossom in the name of productivity and the environment, but there's an easy interim step men can take for the sake of the economy: Fine, quite affordable, 100-per-cent cotton, non-iron shirts – nothing like the smelly static-laced plastic shirts of earlier non-iron claims.

Across this wide land, men and boys in recent days have unwrapped shirts – one small, sad step above socks and handkerchiefs as Christmas presents. Some of them will have been novelty Ts and non-descript polos. Forget them, this is about real shirts. Most should be tossed in the bin because they will need ironing every time they're washed until the fashion finally changes.  

Multiply the number of shirts worn in Australia by the time it takes to remove their natural wrinkles and impose unnatural creases and you pretty much have the national productivity crisis laid out on your ironing board.

While I've heard there are other brands that do the job, I'm personally a fan of LL Bean's heavy Oxford cotton numbers. I have a couple of Brooks Brothers that aren't bad but I've had LL Beans for years and they've never needed to be ironed. Seriously, never. And they probably will last longer than most people's jobs in this disrupted world.

No, this is not a paid plug, no cotton-for-comment here, just a hot tip to make lives significantly easier and more productive, to make Australia well-pressed without pressing.

Happy New wrinkle-free Year.